Jed Escueta
Vice Begins
6 to 30 June 2006
Mag:net Gallery ABS

Jed Escueta’s latest exhibit opening at the Mag:net on the 6 th of June fearlessly enumerates how one can get a fix. Entitled “Vice Begins” and curiously spelled out with little green morphine caps on his coaster-like invitations, Escueta likens the immediacy of taking photos to dropping in or smoking out as cast in by friends and acquaintances in different stages thereof of popping, injecting, rolling, drinking, bunning, burning, blowing, doping, spiffing, dragging a line, cutting, bonging, scraping, blasting-off, chilling. Name it, each kind is all there. Not to be surmised as poignant images of youth gone wrong as those you’d commonly see in a Larry Clark almanac, or even as gorged upon by Nan Goldin who spawned the “snapshot aesthetic”, Escueta’s pictures are more direct in their depiction, nary warranting of any such sentimentality being cashed in by Diesel adverts for all their eye-candy-worthiness.

They are instead Escueta’s record of a routine married with a trigger happy finger snapping every such moment that intersects as well into a taxonomy operation as seen in his 450 or so photographs of rolled joints, all uniformly sized as postcard prints.

The experience though, all pictured here waylay indeed in the ephemeral, as the smoke rings, the

stubbed roaches or the melted paper-A’s, all in the verge of being in the nether region of permanent presence and prescient erasure, all happening in a flash, all at once. This conjuncture is moreover emphasized with digital photography where all seeming reality is instantly translated into a virtual one and easily replaced, easily deleted from existence.

However explicit or straightforward some of Escueta’s images are, to him they are all emanations of light, perchance in this light, emanations of being, slightly altered by whatever was at hand. The constancy of their being photographed render these as a virtue, for Escueta’s devoted aspiration to their authenticity, which is no less harder or easier for everyone to reach for you only need to”… pays your money and you takes your choice.” ( Aldous Huxley in his foreword to the Brave New World)

Vice Begins Opening cocktails will be at 6:30 PM . The show will run until June 30, 2006 .

Mag:net Gallery ABS is at The Loop, ELJ Center , ABS-CBN compound, Mother Ignacia Avenue corner Eugenio Lopez St. QC. For details please call (Genevieve) 4100995 or email magnetplus@gmail.com.