ArtSpeak: Ateneo Art Awards 2018

Join us on October 17 for a conversation with Ateneo Art Awards 2018 - Fernando Zóbel Prizes for Visual Art shortlisted artists Johanna Helmuth, KoloWn (via video call), and Elias Miles Villanueva!

For inquiries, email us at aag@ateneo.edu or call us at 426-6488.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

JOHANNA HELMUTH (Makeshift, Blanc Gallery)

Ateneo Art Awards 2018 - Fernando Zóbel Prizes for Visual Art winner and the recipient of the Artesan Gallery + Studio residency grant in Singapore.

Confronting the viewer with adaptability, Helmuth's Makeshift provides a look into how change forces us to make do of what is sufficient for the time being. Growing up in an area where pedicabs become the homes of its drivers, Johanna Helmuth developed a fascination for temporary measures and how people create and develop makeshifts in order to adapt and survive.

Johanna Helmuth

KoloWn (Low Pressured Areas, Cultural Center of the Philippines)

Ateneo Art Awards 2018 - Fernando Zóbel Prizes for Visual Art winner and the recipient of the La Trobe Art University residency grant in Bendigo, Australia.

Alluding to a weather phenomenon, KoloWn weaves through the Cultural Center of the Philippines Main Theater Building and its grounds. Low Pressured Areas features various site-specific works within and around the building, using designated gallery spaces as well as non-conventional ones. Viewers are led to navigate through the premises encountering site-specific interventions that simultaneously critique art institutions, the art market and traditional modes of art production. In many ways, KoloWn also links with how the Center’s visual arts program evolved since it was inaugurated in 1969. The CCP Museum Department then operated without any proper exhibition facilities but has appropriated rooms and hallways which now have been established as exhibition venues. KoloWn ventures into more alternative spaces and unorthodox and playful ways of presenting and encountering art.

KoloWn

ELIAS MILES VILLANUEVA (What's Left of It, Pinto Art Museum)

Ateneo Art Awards 2018 - Fernando Zóbel Prizes for Visual Art shortlisted artist

Objects and its remnants are prevalent in Miles Villanueva’s art practice. Veering away from conventional forms, he explores new artistic modes, perhaps a response to growing up in a family of artists and a “tiredness of painting”. What’s Left of It has a clinical aura, with glass vitrines and drinking glasses serving as receptacles for specimens in the midst of a white cube space. Glass shards are collected, painted, haphazardly assembled and given names or titles, thus granting them new existence, each unique in form. Titles for these shard assemblages are taken from books, movies, comics and trendy icons indicative of the artist’s ambivalent relationship with pop culture. Moreover, Villanueva brings forth the question of how long these new guise as art will remain after the contextual existence of these encased objects ceases.

Elias Miles Villanueva