Rico J. Reyes

Mediated/Meditated Paint:  Pauletta Chanco’s “The Sacred in Profane”
by Rico J. Reyes

Ohhhmmm.  The verbal mantra of OM, spoken softly and repeatedly generates a sonic frequency to induce a state of disengagement with the material world while simultaneously engaging with the self.  Used in the practice of meditation, OM, is believed to be the sound of creation in Vedic religions.  This frequency is often used during chanting and meditative prayer to bring the spirit back to its point of creation.  Seemingly a passive practice, meditation is an active engagement with the spirit, emotions, and thoughts.  The practice of meditation is a realignment of priorities, priviledging the spirit and redefining its relationship to the material.

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Artist Statement by Ariel Erestingcol, Edited by Rico J. Reyes

CeWEBrities: The Virtual Red Carpet

In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.
- Andy Warhol

CeWEBrities: an Internet personality who has elevated his or her status to celebrity.

Heroes are celebrated for their achievements. Stars are celebrated for their talent or beauty. Celebrities are just famous for being famous. Has Andy Warhol’s prediction come true? The term “celebrity” is used because it is the best word to describe this new type of subjectivity, a new type of understanding persona and individuality that needs an audience and is defined by its audience. This logic of celebrity permeates into the fabric of our day to day lives and is performed at exceedingly fast speeds on the web, creating a new type of persona, a CeWEBrity.

Due to websites like YouTube, Facebook, flickR and Myspace anyone can access fame and become an instantly recognizable figure. Indeed, everyone can be famous for fifteen minutes. Today’s social networking technology has created a generation (often called the millennial generation or Generation Y, defined as any person born between 1982 and 2001) of do-it-yourself cyber-celebrities. These computer and Internet savvy youths present themselves to the world via profiles, photos and videos, and promote themselves by manipulating crudely or sophisticatedly brand identity strategies.

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Units of Understanding and Increments of Meaning
Works of Ariel Erestingcol

The art of Ariel Erestingcol is a document of material innovation and thematic investigation.  In his series, titled Landmark #1-4 (all from 2007), presented at his solo exhibition at Togonon Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Erestingcol uses fusion beads, commonly used in children craft projects, to explore the subject matter of disasters and policies of emergency preparedness and response.  Landmark #1-4 and his major oeuvre, Lima Zulu Charlie 646 (LZC 646), 2007, are rendered through the meticulous placement of these colorful beads, a technique employed that takes careful planning and hours to execute. Acting like pixels on a digital screen, each bead is a unit that builds up to recreate the horrific scene like that of the Oklahoma City bombing depicted in LZC 646 or television broadcast alerts that are depicted in the Landmark series.

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While the EPIC: Visualizing Heroes Within exhibition at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco, one of Weiwei Lo’s pieces has gone missing.  I am assuming that the pieces was stolen. Part of the series of framed family photographs and intimate polaroids, this stolen piece makes me wonder about San Francisco’s appetite for sexual visual work.

The image circled is the missing piece.

Two polaroid pictures are placed in one frame along with a crocheted doily.  The polaroids depict two sets of [women's] legs in a bathtub full of ruddy water.  My initial thought was this picture is highly fetishistic, involving blood and water sport as part of a lesbian tryst.  Indeed, this picture might move someone, and I am assuming a lusty lesbian into fetish play, to pilfer a framed piece secured to the wall and take it home with her for future sexual and visual delight.

Needless to say, I am very upset at the security at SOMArts Gallery for the lax security and having a gallery that is not secure, but how does one negotiate such a situation given the state of funding for arts festivals, exhibitions, and art spaces.

I am just hoping that the new SOMArts Executive Director and administration will review current security protocol and creatively come up with a sustainable solution.

EPIC: VISUALIZING HEROES WITHIN

Visual artists – working in different media and style, addressing a vast range of issues and themes, identifying with multiple hyphens, slashes, and qualifiers – converge in one gallery to launch EPIC: Visualizing Heroes Within.  This visual art exhibition, presented under the auspices of the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA), is being held at the SOMArts Cultural Center Bay Gallery in association with Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center as part of the 12th Anniversary United States of Asian America (USAA) Festival and with Queer Cultural Center as part of the 12th Annual National Queer Arts Festival. GAPA has been instrumental in organizing exhibitions that poignantly address issues of identity within the Gay Asian community.  This year’s exhibition, EPIC: Visualizing Heroes Within engages this identity within the frame of the image economy, the politics of difference, and the expression of an imagined nation.
This exhibition brings forth lofty ideas of how identity is expressed and negotiated as strategies on how we as a community can access our total selves through visualizing heroes within each of us.  Our daily lives become examples of heroic deeds, recounted, retrospectively and in totality, it emerges as an epic. EPIC: Visualizing Heroes Within is an act of self-determination; it is an act of resistance; it is a negation of a negation; it is a dynamic, multivalent reflection on Queer Asian Pacific American viewpoints, identities, imagination, and desires.