UP Vargas Museum opens the exhibition titled Visualizing Sound at the 3F Galleries of the museum.
Visualizing Sound is an exhibition that presents the collaboration between artist Gerardo Tan, musicologist Felicidad A. Prudente, and master weaver Sammy Buhle. The exhibition reflects on the translation of forms through the work Rendering, a video and audio documentation notated in modern sound symbols, which are then translated into visual images, and in turn interpreted in textile by the ikat method. Complementing this is another work by Tan titled Speaking in Tongue(inspired by an indigenous chant from Kalinga called sogna) that tries to articulate the production of vocal sounds resonating from a singer’s mouth. Thus, the exhibition Visualizing Sound becomes an intersection of modes rooted in tradition and enriched in multidisciplinary contexts.
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Gerardo Tan works across media from painting, photography and artists books to video and found objects in room-sized installations. His materials range from traditional ones like oil, acrylic and digital prints on canvas to the commonplace and the found like dust, mirrors, bundy clocks, asphalt and live chickens. Tan’s works deal with issues of representation and conceptual plays. He often appropriates reproduced images from the world of art and from mass-media using a variety of media in order to subvert hierarchies and give way to new itinerant meanings.
Tan is a graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY) and the University of the Philippines (UP). He has lectured at the art departments of UP, University of the East (UE) and Kalayaan College. His group exhibitions include the 1st Manila Biennale, Bastards of Misrepresentation in New York, Berlin and Bangkok, the First Melbourne Biennale, the 3rd Asian Art Biennial Bangladesh at Osmani Memorial Hall in Dhaka, the 2nd Asian Art Show at the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan. Solo exhibitions include Doppelgangers in Taksu, Singapore and Malaysia, Sight Unseen in Galerie Zimmerman-Kratochwill, Austria, and New Works in Total Galerie, Alliance Francaise de Manille, Philippines.
Tan’s honors include a CCP 13 Artists Award, A Fulbright-Hays Grant at SUNY Buffalo, the Barbara Schuller’s Art Associates Award in Buffalo, New York and the Juror’s Choice at the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP) Annual Competition.
Felicidad A. Prudente, Ph.D. is one of the leading Filipino ethnomusicologists in the country today. Her field of expertise is in indigenous music cultures with specialization in Philippine music. Having conducted field research around the Philippines over the years, Prudente has written and published articles on various aspects of Philippine music such as epic singing, vocal polyphony, and gong culture. A piano and music education graduate from St. Paul College of Manila, Prudente pursued graduate studies in musicology at the University of the Philippines. In 1984, she completed her doctoral studies in musicology with emphasis in ethnomusicology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where she was Visiting Professor in 2004. She served as music professor at the University of the Philippines and consultant at the Philippine Women’s University. Currently, she is an active member of the International Council for Traditional Music and its study group on the performing arts of Southeast Asia where she regularly presents her research.
Sammy Buhle belongs to the younger generation of weaving artisans of Ifugao Province. He comes from a family of weavers who taught him the art of weaving at an early age. Born in 1989 in Banaue, he acknowledges his maternal grandmother, Kittayan Niploy, a respected and well-known weaver during her time as well as her mother Angelina Niploy who continues to weave in backstrap loom. His father Fernando Buhle specializes in dyeing and weaves as well. Buhle studied management accounting at St. Mary’s University and accounting at Aldersgate College in Nueva Vizcaya but later pursued his passion in weaving. He now handles the family weaving house which was established in 1982 in Hingyon. Buhle participates in various textile fairs in Metro Manila where he presents his ikat cloth, blankets, and other products.
Visualizing Sound runs until 7 March.
