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Orange Project Building, Art District, Lopue’s Annex Building, Mandalagan Bacolod City, Philippines 6100
Faye Abantao is a Bacolod based visual artist known for hybrid works done in deconstructed archival prints, origami and digital collage. Her multifold process is an interplaying mixture of contents, patterns and images. The overlapping layers give Abantao’s distinct kafkaesque flamboyance which depict fragments of reality in mirage-like scenes or incomplete memories.
The preparation of the origami tapestry entails a separate bulk of tasks. It is a painstaking procedure of collecting acid-free book paper, archival prints, cutting the pages in uniform dimensions and folding each piece one by one before finally attaching them on canvas.
The particularity of the artform can be linked to modular origami where sheets of paper are folded into identical units/modules and then slotted together to create a larger geometric form. Attaching modular origami on fabric as one would assemble a quilt is, perhaps, the closest comparative reference to Abantao’s works.
The repetitive routine of the artist tends to be machine-like. Everything appears calculated to the point of Abantao describing her artwork mathematically- identifying a piece according to the number of folds and modules therein.
The separate histories of the materials and art practices that Abantao fused on canvas are each, and together, descriptive of the human brain. This compliments her fascination with the personal unconscious which psychoanalyst Carl Jung summarised as “everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking.”
Origami, literally translating to ‘folding paper,’ were rare ornaments in 6th century Japan (brought by Chinese Buddhists who practiced it since 200 AD). The origami sculptures were created for/used in spiritual ceremonies as sacred symbols of enlightenment.
And just as the paper folds, so does the brain. It is hypothesized that the more wrinkled and folded the brain is, the more information it has stored. This wrinkling is due to the brain- folding in on itself, expanding inward since it cannot go beyond the hard casing of the skull. This is why the experience of understanding something has a cathartic effect solely real to the experiencer. No two brains take information the same way, so that even if one parcel of knowledge is offered to multiple observers, how they react (and each brain folds) remains completely unique.
In a way, the wider the perception is spread out, the more folded the brain becomes.
At the dawn of civilization, people started learning more than they could keep in their heads. The capacity of the brain in storing knowledge was exhausted. It could not absorb all the science and history that was manifesting. This dilemma prodded mankind to transfer and store knowledge externally in the form of scrolls. These scrolls later transitioned into books.
The new and post contemporary artists often deliver new media, unconventional objects, and the mixture or absence of it all.
There is much clamor around the topic of appropriation in visual arts. When is it okay to source out images? How extensive does the creative transformation have to be in order to make the result-image new, original, and therefore- legal? These complications make some artists hesitant in exploring art appropriation; cancelling it out from their choice of art research altogether.
Faye Abantao is a Fine Arts graduate of La Consolacion College, Major in Advertising (2015). She is trained and consequently fluent in painting, photography and digital arts. These methods are all applied in her creativism.
Identification equates with Idem facere; “to make the same” in Latin. To identify with others literally translates to finding one’s self in others rather than seeing their otherness exclusively. In the artist’s search for references, the difficulty is minimizing the scope thoughtfully until she finally concludes the infinity of options into a single image.
Abantao’s digital collage is a synthesis of identifying and transforming images to be encountered as a new form. It is, perhaps, an artist’s attempt to gather all notions of what art is/is not and giving it back to the decision of the viewer.
Perhaps the whole scale is meant to be a patchwork; finished only when the observer patches his/her own story on it.
In this sense, the viewer and the artist become one in asking, and henceforth, one in searching.
The artist asks; “Am I returning back home or merely visiting a place I used to live in? Will my old homes forever be a part of me- defining my path, my future? Or is where I am currently living the only place that will, that should, write my story?”
The concept of detaching from one’s mind exists in all spiritual practices. Metanoia which is commonly understood as a “change of heart” translates more accurately to “beyond the mind.”
Abantao’s initial destructive tendency of stripping off books and archival prints may cause one to cringe at the sight of, let’s assume, a torn out literature piece. It seems to be a performance of defiance, at first. The entire process of mixing the accumulated collection of texts in total disregard of their purpose and value is comparable to vandalism.
At a closer look though, there is a powerful sense of freedom in it.
A sense that knowledge is no longer confined. It is no longer chained to an author, or from what country it was from. Or to whom it was written against, or for.
Knowledge has become, like art, meant for all. It is finally, in the words of Carl Sagan, “world property.”
And as the consciousness expands, we continue to put things together; folding it all into one.
Faye Abantao opened her solo exhibit titled “Personal Unconscious” at Orange Project, Bacolod City last September 6, 2020. It ponders on the indivisible wholeness of beings. The exhibit explores the binding power of context over the mind; not the thinking/feeling process itself, but the awareness behind them.
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Orange Project Building, Art District, Lopue’s Annex Building, Mandalagan Bacolod City, Philippines 6100