Lopez Museum’s BEAT exhibit on ANC’s Cityscape, Manila, Philippines 2012

ANC’s Cityscape recently featured Lopez Museum’s current exhibition called “Beat” which explores the wordplay that comes with the summoning of dual meanings.

Beat registers as ultimate defeat and/or surrender, relational terms that could easily be associated with such pieces as Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo’s “The Assassination of Governor General Bustamante”, “Ofelia” or “La Barca de Aqueronte “; Jeremias Navarro’s “Flying Machine for Icarus”, and, Danilo Dalena’s “Talo”. It may also indicate rhythm and movement as in the ribaldry of Juvenal Sanso’s “Carnival, La Fete”, “Mardi Gras”, “Joyride”or through Pacita Abad’s “Recluse”.

Beat also occasions the commissioning of new work from two contemporary artists – Nikki Luna and Ernest Concepcion.

Luna has consistently shown a propensity toward realizing ironically stoic-toned installations while invoking intense emotions emanating from personal and collective trauma. Luna’s installation “Precious and Fertile” is inspired by her concern for the farmers of Hacienda Luisita and the various issues of the indigenous people in their ancestral lands. For the installation, she hung a number of bone china pipes in different attitudes atop soil poured on the floor. Along with these elements, a portion of a documentary about the Hacienda Luisita is projected over the bone china installation.

While Concepcion, in these recent years of re-establishing his art practice in the East Coast of the United States has taken to staging performative art duels. His “Hidalgo, the super multi-dimensional time bandit” features the caricatured head of Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo surrounded by artifacts of war and destruction. Concepcion’s drawings spill out unto other parts of the museum including the main hallway and unto walls upon which hang objects from the permanent collection of the museum.

The exhibit will run until October 2012. The Lopez Memorial Museum is at the ground floor of Benpres Building, Exchange Road corner Meralco Avenue, Pasig City. Museum days and hours are Mondays to Saturdays, except holidays, 8am-5pm. For more information, call 631-2417.