Lesley-Anne Cao | Jao San Pedro | Celine Lee
ARTISTS TO WATCH (a2w)
Each month we invite a member of the She Performs community to share their Artists to Watch - a personal selection of artists whose work has caught their attention. This month we’re delighted to welcome back artist and curator, Pam Quinto to the pages of She Performs with her selection of a2w - Lesley-Anne Cao, Jao San Pedro and Celine Lee.
LESLEY-ANNE CAO
Lesley-Anne Cao is a visual artist based in Quezon City, Philippines. Her work is a series of processes and divergent practices that revolve around art-making, the exhibition, and fiction. Recent works use recognisable materials such as books, plants, debris, precious metals, and money, enacting displacements and substitutions by way of creating sets and narratives.
Arrangement (Golds) was developed for Cao’s residency in southwest Finland, between Örö Island, and the harbour village of Dalsbruk:
By the time Spanish colonisers arrived in 1521 in the archipelago they would name the Philippines, my ancestors had already been wearing and trading gold for more than five hundred years. “Oro” means “gold” in Spanish; unfamiliar with its Swedish meaning (which I later learned means “island of small stones”), “Örö” meant the colour and element when I first read its name.
Here she presents the audience with a multitude of golden things: found frames, a dragon egg, round bells, work gloves, a book titled Golds, a video, a tarpaulin, eyelets, and a poster borrowed from a library. She also writes of having learned that there is gold in the ocean, around 20 million pounds of it diluted, suspended in water. But we’re incapable of mining this, ‘like an absurd joke, except it's really just nature indifferent, and beautiful, beautiful. There and nowhere.’
For the 3rd Kamias Triennial, Sawsawan: Conversations in the Dirty Kitchen, Cao presents Recitation (Spirit), which explores the potentialities of images and their presentations to be unintelligible, how these can stutter and resist documentation. She investigates visibility and perceptibility in relation to materiality, physical perception, and public participation through the photograph of a bird printed on tulle, and a simulation of makeshift street signs and metal barriers. Breath-like, the work flits and evades the camera’s grasp and its ability to capture an image.
In Cao’s works we’ll find the paradox of the withheld and the given: the unknowable is the given—the given which resists being named and possessed. This can be made available to us, but only ever indirectly or obliquely. Cao embraces objectness in that the reality of things can never be wholly grasped and understood, and does so by gesturing towards the thing in itself and elsewhere.
Images courtesy of the artist.
JAO SAN PEDRO
Jao San Pedro is a visual artist and interdisciplinary designer based in Manila, Philippines. Her work is an inquiry into the body within the context of space, identity, form, and structure. In her entwined process of meditation and making, she attempts to disrupt the binary that limits and informs our preconceptions of physicality and being. She interweaves fibre, textile, pattern, and repetition to form a systematised language and concretise the abstract.
In developing her solo exhibition Transgendering the Grid, Jao found the path she wants to carve out from here on out. The spaciousness and malleability of being takes form in transgendered grids that articulate the fluidity of gender. Rigid masculinity is subverted and softened in Form 1 to 5, bent by the flow and growth of queer and transgender folk; the stoic is made alive by entanglements of hair weaved through warped grids.
With a juxtaposition of the artist’s body and grids in Fieldnotes on Form 1 to 3, the audience is shown how queer and transgender folk have always existed in a beyond that reaches farther than the heteronormative limitations and conventions of the grid, a beyond that even predates the often imperial and colonial grids. These self-portraits capture the journey of embracing one’s own body and being, through which San Pedro gently holds and claims space for herself as she queries womanhood and what it entails.
“My work is the sum of my fallen parts pieced together in a quest to one day stand in my own completeness”
As she navigates being and transgendering, she weaves within and beyond the structures and constructs of gendered bodies, queering our binary understanding of identity and physicality. To strictly define what something or someone ought to be limits the possibilities of what one can be. Being is never really fixed, wholeness in actuality refuses and evades rigid definition. Coming into one’s own is a matter of unearthing what is already infinitely present within us. According to the artist, ‘Wholeness isn’t an end, it’s now.’
Images courtesy of the artist.
CELINE LEE
A point, a line, a plane – the shadow. Celine Lee’s body of work revolves around rudimentary scientific and mathematical concepts and principles in an attempt to understand contemporaneity. She views art as she would science – a perpetual quest for knowledge. Since the beginning of her artistic career, Lee has been producing works with the use of different materials and media; often focusing on process and materiality. Whether in the form of a painting, a sculpture, an embroidery piece, or multimedia work, Lee explores the ability of visual perception and spatial recognition to invoke concepts that extend beyond form.
In Lee’s practice, science is mingled with poetics of making. She transfigures craft and experimentation by undertaking various gestures of forming a line or a plane and multiplies the act to create dynamic forms that point the audience to an awareness of space. Thus, a common theme that runs through Lee’s body of work is spacetime. Some of the structures that she deploys to embody this concept are wireframes and a series of points, as seen in Fig. 3 Bird. This particular polyptych presents four suspended planes, rendered based on the topography of the city of Taguig, where her solo exhibition A Surface was held. Here Lee views spacetime as akin to the way coordinates are presented on the world map. These planes could be also be interpreted as layers of worldsheets—the two-dimensional manifold which describe the embedding of a string in spacetime.
Meanwhile, Lee’s other works such as her ongoing disinfection series, are imprinted with marks of time. When Manila was placed under lockdown, she started the project in which employs bleach as a painting medium or catalyst. In Traces, she facilitates the creation of a line by transforming the now ubiquitous disinfection mat into a surface that records the passage of viewers. Her untitled piece was made by carefully placing bleach pellets on abaca paper dyed in black, letting these slowly dissolve on the wet surface. In the resulting image, the points where specks of bleach were placed transformed into a constellation of golden, starlike forms.
Lee’s proclivity towards the repetition of a point or a line in order to form a complex image, “like atoms and the universe,” is evocative of String theory—which posits that all subatomic particles are actually just different vibrations of the same string, therefore everything in the universe are expressions of this invisible filament.
Images courtesy of the artist.
Traces (2020)
Pam Quinto is an artist and curator based in Manila, Philippines. She is the founder of Parcel Exhibitions, ‘an alternative exhibition modality that seeks to sustain the intimacy of physically experiencing art in the time of Covid-19’ by sending participating artists’ works to individuals’ homes, making the viewer, ‘an activator of the exhibition’. SP Global’s Camille Ignacio was one such activator, and wrote about her time with Fiat Lux for She Performs. Camille also interviewed Pam about the genesis of the exhibition series and her curatorial process.
More information can be found on Pam’s website.
