Curtains: a film in three parts

The University of the Philippines Vargas Museum opens its 2010 calendar with the exhibit titled, Curtains: a film in three parts by Los Angeles based artists, Camilo Ontiveros and Michelle Dizon. The exhibit opens on 14 January 2010, 6pm at the Third Floor Galleries of the Museum.

Curtains: a film in three parts asks toward the politics and ethics of the field of vision, especially how it relates to geographies and events that appear distanced or apart from one’s everyday reality. The exhibit takes a filmic approach to the gallery installation and is concerned with the experience of duration and the act of looking itself.

The project is composed of three parts with text, photographs, and a curtain woven from burnt textile collected at the ruins of marketplace in Mindanao. Suggestions of disaster punctuate the exhibition with broken bottles, the carcass of a burnt dog, and fragments of textile that bear the traces of a fire. Yet, throughout the work these suggestions of disaster are consistently paired with images of anonymous windows, whose focus is not on the view outside but rather on the window itself.

Curtains: a film in three parts expands the field of vision to not only what we see, but also, to what we do not see. Instead of taking for granted the oft-assumed statement that art is a window onto another world, it offers a curtain, and asks what might be seen by not seeing.

On January 14, 4pm as a prelude to the exhibit opening, a panel discussion with scholars and activists on the question of Mindanao will be held. Confirmed panelists include Herbert Docena from Focus on the Global South. This discussion is cosponsored by the Global Commons Foundation.

A gallery walk through with Camilo Ontiveros and Michelle Dizon will be held on 15 January at 1 pm. Admission to this activity is free of charge.

The exhibition will travel in April to the Redcat Gallery, Los Angeles. The works of Ontiveros and Dizon will be part of the collaborative project titled, Not Very Far Apart.

Camilo Ontiveros holds a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. Ontiveros is co-founder of Lui Velazquez, a space in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico that facilitates critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices and events by inviting artists to participate in short-term residencies. Ontiveros has exhibited internationally in places such as Getty Center in Los Angeles, Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, CECUT in Tijuana, Contemporary Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, Exit Art Gallery in New York, and Cesto Senso in Italy among others.

Michelle Dizon is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. Her projects are concerned with questions of postcoloniality, globalization, social movements, and historical memory. She has taught at the California Institute of the Arts and is currently on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Dizon holds an MFA from the Interdisciplinary Studio program in the Department of Art at UCLA and she is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Rhetoric with designated emphases in Film and Women, Gender, and Sexuality at UC Berkeley.

This exhibition was made possible with a residency from Green Papaya Art Projects and the support of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
 
For more information, please contact the UP Vargas Museum at 928-19-27 (direct line), 928-19-25 (telefax), 0929-8567909 (mobile), or send us an e-mail at vargasmuseum@gmail.com. The museum's official website may be viewed at www.vargasmuseum.org.

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