Ulinig
November 26 to December 15, 2006
Gallery 2 and Gallery Shop


Manibalang
November 26 to December 15, 2006
Gallery 1

One-time Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards winner Joy Mallari hold two simultaneous solo exhibitions, Ulinig and Manibalang, at the Pinto Art Gallery from November 26 to December 15, 2006. These exhibits represent her first one-person shows in more than a decade of professional art practice as a key member of art collectives Salingpusa and Sanggawa.

Ulinig is a series of paintings attempts to combine the visual language of both painting and film; of still and animated image. The movements of a speaking subject are spread out in frames across a grid structure. The works invite the viewer to lip read the syllables in each frame, forming a phrase. By taking one frame at a time one can follow both the progression of the image and the decoding of the text - producing movement and message in the process. Among the highlight works of Ulinig are “Mawalang Galang Po”, Mallari’s winning piece in the 2001 Philippine Art Awards and “Ama Namin”, the artist’s entry to the 2001 Osaka Triennial.

Manibalang represents the artist’s more recent series of works that reflect her observations of the Filipino diaspora in the US within her five year residence in California. Contending that Filipinos residing abroad are essentially marginalized, Mallari depicts their existence through images of the Pinoy that inhabit or appear within figures of well-known Western masterpieces. The artist says that “We have become parasites in bodies we've formerly owned; forced to adopt the lineage of another race. So we pretend to fit in these foreign genealogies even though we live as marginal inhabitants, citizens of the periphery, and footnotes to a history we have never written.”

Mallari took up her studies in art at the University of the Philippines. A founding member of Salingpusa and Sanggawa groups, she has initiated and participated in several notable group exhibitions in the US, Australia, Japan and in Denmark.