Let's Talk: Astraberry

Our Current Condition is the second year of Fortuna Circuit, an annual exhibition featuring artists from all around the Philippines.  To give more detail on the artists and their work, we've decided to feature a few interviews with the artists. 

What art piece(s) are you bringing to the exhibit? What’s the story behind it? 

My piece is entitled “Nascent” and this is my current condition.I believe I am still very “young” in my art journey. 

Yes, it has been many years since I engaged in making art, but I feel there is still much to develop. 

Having a baby gave me this realization. I looked at him when he came out, he is such a beautiful work of art and design and I adore him so much. 

Later on, I realized that as perfect as I think he is, I knew he is going to be stronger, more beautiful, and more mature in the years to come.

 I reflected it on my works.  I can be more confident, create more powerful art and generally a better person than I am today in the years to come. And just as I sometimes whisper to my child “don’t grow up too fast”, I would love to enjoy the process and take my time well.

What school of art do you follow? Who are your influences?
 Hayao Miyazaki (founder of Studio Ghibli) is one of my influences, not just in art style but in the philosophies he had for his works. I have also adored Gustav Klimt’s works which speaks to my soul intensely. I love artists who can creatively convey a story in their works. To name a few more of my influences, Nicole Gustaffson, Mary Blair, Valerie Chua and works of Cartoon Saloon led by Tomm Moore. I am never satisfied with just one art style.

What’s your art process? Do you have any habits or practices that you do before making a piece (eg taking a walk, or drinking beer before painting)? 
Sleep and coffee. Meditating and scribbling. 

Where do you want your art to take you? Where do you see yourself and your art in the future? 

I want my art to take me where I will be truly happy. Fame, wealth, success in career are all people’s ambitions in one point or another. But my deepest desire is that I will be able to continue creating art while I can still be with the people I love and that my heart would help bring healing and inspiration to people.

Advice to budding artists out there.

We often get tempted to go into the direction where we want our art to get more attention and appreciation to a certain group of people we want to impress. Partly, it’s alright, we are after all artists and we want to be appreciated. But don’t fall into the trap of settling into the trend or copying just because it’s most "sell-able". Explore deeper into your own soul, and then it will manifest naturally.

Let's Talk: Zach Villegas

Our Current Condition is the second year of Fortuna Circuit, an annual exhibition featuring artists from all around the Philippines.  To give more detail on the artists and their work, we've decided to feature a few interviews with the artists. 

What art piece(s) are you bringing to the exhibit? What’s the story behind it? 

I submitted something I’ve been trying to get rid of for 2 years now. It’s a collage of photographs.

It’s called “You are a Beautiful Regret—Cigarettes from two years ago.” It’s basically just residual emotion for and from a past flame that I don’t want anymore. The piece is more cathartic and self-serving rather than weaponized and socially relevant.

To me it’s important that I present this piece. Not only for myself but for anyone who’s hurting. I believe we deserve closure, and we can get that closure from ourselves. This is what my piece really means. It’s me coming to terms with myself.

          What school of art do you follow? Who are your influences?

            I look up to a lot of contemporary artists and more post-modern notions. A few artists I look to would probably be Keith Haring, Pollock, Ren Hang, Warhol, Daido Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, and maybe a couple of the older ones like Magritte, G. Colbert, H. Bosch, and Munch.

These people have their own way of telling stories, specially the older artists. Semiotics plays a big role in telling stories. In a way a lot of these artists entwine meaning with mundane symbols and tell a rather interesting story.   

What’s your art process? Do you have any habits or practices that you do before making a piece (eg taking a walk, or drinking beer before painting)?

My art process is actually rather simple. I usually start off wasting time drinking alone or going on photowalks so I can clear my headspace for any ideas. When I get a hold of something I want to speak about, I usually dive into maybe a week of just research. After that I conduct photoshoots to serve as my studies for the actual thing. Once I know how execute it then, Poof! I do the shoot and I’m done.

But my art process doesn’t necessarily follow this pattern. Suffering from some kind of mental illness, I tend to spiral a lot and get stuck in a rabbit hole full of self-loathing. When I realize I’m in that hole, I usually just take random abstract photos. Taking photos is more cathartic to me that what it actually is. I can say I owe my life to photography.

Where do you want your art to take you? Where do you see yourself and your art in the future?

Wherever it does take me, I’d be happy either way, though a solo- show at some gallery wouldn’t hurt either.  I’m working on a long-term project on an advocacy I keep close to my heart and hopefully culminate it with an artist book or something tangible. Hopefully this project would help open eyes and minds. I don’t mind where art takes me. All I really wanna do is to just be able to create.

Advice to budding artists out there.

Keep on creating and hone your craft. 
Don’t let things like “aesthetics” get in the way of the conversation with your audience. Honesty in art 

Let's Talk: Ronyel Compra

Our Current Condition is the second year of Fortuna Circuit, an annual exhibition featuring artists from all around the Philippines.  To give more detail on the artists and their work, we've decided to feature a few interviews with the artists.

What art piece(s) are you bringing to the exhibit? What’s the story behind it?  

Im showing a luta piece. I went to a tribe in bukidnon; Talaandig. The artist and craftmakers in the tribe is known for their soil paintings. For my piece, I will be using their local soil. I will apply the soil into the red and white cloth which is a common color in their culture and throughout the other tribes in Mindanao and Philippines.

 What school of art do you follow? Who are your influences?

I dont follow a particular school of art. I follow what works based on personal beliefs and principles or whats available. I like the works of Anselm Kiefer, Ai Weiwei, Zhan Huan.

What’s your art process? Do you have any habits or practices that you do before making a piece (eg taking a walk, or drinking beer before painting)? 

For this particular piece, since it’s a collaborative piece, I built relationship with the community first, then after several visits to the tribe, I went through a ritual, asking permission from the spirits and the tribal elders. luckily the people willingly participated.

Where do you want your art to take you? Where do you see yourself and your art in the future? 

I  want to create and develop more ideas. I could either throw away what im currently working on or incorporate this in the future. Im sure my art will grow with me thats for certain regardless of time or place

Advice to budding artists out there.

art, like love, is never enough. hardwork is.. haha

Umbra 2.0: Women Dancing With Light and Shadow

“PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there's a word to lift your hat to... to find that phosphorescence, that light within...”
― Emily Dickinson

They’re back – the Umbra artists who capture gradating bolts of light and shadow that spill around women, bringing out their varying but equally captivating shades and shine.  

After a successful exhibit last year in the Queen City of The South, black and white photographers Jan Sunday and Banawe Corvera continue pushing their crusade for art and women forward, crossing regions and taking Umbra 2.0 to the people up in Luzon.

With a new set of photos and the addition of another female Bisaya artist, Gail Gerriane, Umbra 2. 0 does away with regional boundaries to showcase the power and beauty of the Bisaya woman and artistry through a new exhibit which opened yesterday at Quezon City’s Vetro.

“Art is a luxury and responsibility. Whatever we put out for the world to take in from our work is a reflection of ourselves and who we aspire to be,” Jan explains. “And we hope to be a crusade of inspiration for women artists, especially from our region, to go out and exhibit and take great leaps and for photography to gain a deeper appreciation as with fine art. This is a conscious effort to be seen, heard and felt as an artist, as a Bisaya, as a woman and as ourselves. We hope to show the world, with Manila as the jump off, our take on womanhood and fine art photography.”

Promoting self-image awareness and photography as fine art, Jan, Nawe and Gail move to empower women all over through their new b&w collection. 

“The three share the belief that we do what we do, because it's who we are as artists. We simply want to bring the works of Bisaya artists to a relatively new and wider audience, to share what we love doing, and in the process, inspire other women photographers,” Nawe adds. 

Of course, the process wasn’t easy - the three had to go through their own light and shadows. The previous year had thrown all sorts of challenges to the three artists individually, struggles that resulted in artistic growth.

Despite the difficulties of finding subjects to model for the project, Gail was able to come up with her own bold and dynamic set to feature along with the works of Nawe and Jan, Gail’s mentor in art school.  Meanwhile, the hurdles of the prior year had helped Nawe find a new creative spur, opening up a new chapter in the prolific photographer’s life as an artist. 

Through all of obstacles that come along their way, these bold and daring Bisaya artist’s vision for Umbra 2.0 remains the same – to teach women to be their own light.  

Umbra 2.0 is available for viewing at Vetro in Quezon City until March 31. 

Text by: Tiny Diapana

First published in Sunstar Weekend, March 19,2017. 

Link: http://weekend.sunstar.com.ph/blog/2017/03/19/umbra-2-0-women-dancing-light-shadow/

What is happening on our landing page?

Web browser as an Art Gallery.

You might be wondering why last August that our main homepage www.streetkonect.com wasn't loading the traditional logo. It was replaced by Lea Valle’s photo slides entitled “nutrition facts”.

Last January it was replaced also with Ernest Dino’s video art “Queen City”.

From the inception of streetkonect we really wanted to use the main homepage not as normal website. Flaunting our logo like a normal blog wasn’t enough.

That is why from the start when we bought the domain the blog was addressed as blog.streetkonect.com. We tried to update the homepage every now and again however the team's enthusiasm to refurbish the site eventually tuckered out because lack of proper programming

Nine years after the Philippines finally saw a whole lot more technological advancement and the internet became a little bit accessible. Browsers have gained much more power - looking back nine years ago, it was terribly difficult for us to access a page on Internet Explorer from rowdy internet cafes. Now, we can access the browser in our phones, tablet and many other devices at any given moment - well, if we have data.

We are happy about the growth and outcome of street art today. A lot more people appreciate and support the field now. Just like the enthusiasm that we felt during the street art inception in the Philippines, we are excited to witness new forms of art emerging into the scene.

One of the new art forms is the use the web browser as an exhibition space. The browser has become a powerful tool and now that we have collaborators that have software engineering know-how, many future possibilities can be experimented and done. The next web art show we are showcasing CYMKa’s work entitled: “runExecuteCommand”.

The exhibition will run until April 31, 2017. There will be an offline/gallery version of this piece on 856 G Gallery that will also be a part of the Fortuna Circuit Exhibition.

You can visit our shows more often now - everything it is right at your fingertip.

In-Bound Posts

Post No Bill. Seems like words from new testament, commanding us to be pure and clean. But anyway, who isn’t doing it? Who isn’t putting posters up on the street?

From advertisements of a hotel, to a political campaign, religious events, money loan, massage, home service - the examples are unlimited. Before the facebook age, pasting your agenda on the street using posters and stickers used to be one of the easiest and cheapest way to get noticed by the public and despite the power of social media marketing, it remains posting on the street still remains effective today.

Considering its effectivity, there’s no reason why artists wouldn’t do the same for their own sake. Posters and stickers gave new aesthetics to artists who were working using the traditional method of tagging graffiti. After all, the medium was a lot faster to spread because of the fact that all the materials could be prepared in the studio before the posting itself. The only disadvantage is that stickers and posters can far more easily be removed compared to traditional paints of graffiti.

The group Pilipinas Street Plan is one of the first collective to experiment stickers and posters during 2006 but some of its members was doing stickers and posters way before the group was founded

.Early sticker exchange and sticker shows outside the country gave the artists chances to showcase their works beyond their city and country.

The Disconnect show, the longest running sticker show in the country which held their 8th exhibition last month, helps sticker artists from the Philippines to showcase their works in an indoor set or beyond the normal street practice.

Now, in almost all major Philippine cities you cannot a see a telephone box or an electric post without a poster or a sticker.

In-Bound Posts, an exhibition part of the Sikka Art Fair, aims to bring the same energy on the Philippine streets to an indoor more controlled environment.

The show is curated by Mark Baretto one of the founders of the Pilipinas Street Plan who started doing stickers and posters in 2003.

Streetkonect

photos by Mark Baretto