Creativity Surges in Daloy Exhibit Opening
The Daloy art event was launched with the opening of a visual art exhibition at the Jorge Vargas Museum on February 5, 2016. Exhibit curators, Patrick Flores and Ruel Caasi challenged artists to to dissect, respond to and expound on the various aspects of and issues surrounding Water- flow and stagnation, roots and routes, sustainer and destroyer (life and death), and barriers and links.
Daloy was a continuation of Project Bakawan, an environmental art festival at the University of the Philippines-Diliman last February 2015. The exhibit ranfrom February 5 to 26, 2016.
CURATORIAL NOTE
Water is an intimate substance; our bodies hang in its balance. It covers a lot of ground of our world, marking out how near or far we are from each other. For sure, we move across bodies of water. We stay in it. We cross it.
In this exhibition, artists take to water in many ways. They present it again in images that flesh out its meaning, its energy, its potential, its vitality, its wonder and its dread. In this representation or re-presence of both medium and material, it gains a particular context. Water leaves its vacuum and its vastness. It is at a certain point captured, contained, subjected to the critical reflection of art. The artists explore various styles and media to register the force of water. They locate it in a lush ecology or raise it as a specter of perdition. They regard it as a condition of trade and circulation, rendering vessels possible and necessary.
They, therefore, invest water with history and let it play out in everyday life. The art historian David Clarke has written a book on art and water and he begins with two quotes that may well serve as the sight lines of this exhibition. It was Heraclitus who said that “Everything flows.” And here, migration and capital are not exempt. And from Gaston Bachelard: “The eye itself, pure vision, becomes tired of looking at solids.”
-Patrick Flores
The artists that participated in the event are listed below:
Daloy Exhibit Gallery