Maria Taniguchi
Some Permanent Interludes
13 – 27 January 2007
Mag:net Katipunan

Maria Taniguchi's latest exhibit entitled Some Permanent Interludes on view at Mag:net Katipunan from January 13 to 27, 2007 touches upon her condition she's constantly coping with and which has invariably become the subject of most of the works featured for this show. Vertigo or the sensation of "falling away from one's self"[1] or a disorientation of spatial perception is verily demonstrated in a looped video of her spinning around her studio, her feet in a perennial mid-air 1 ft off the floor.

Large photo prints of sunlight filtering through foliage like a Mojave 3 album cover recreates the same effect or rather the dazed vision of such sufferer. Although another photo entitled "Galaxy" showing a tree as if lit from within by moonlight with fireworks falling like rain on its side distills such sensation into a brilliant haze. This photo is actually her attempt in capturing the fleeting "gray vision" she's sort of witnessed back home in Dumaguete during the holidays.

A gray-primed canvas panel seemingly overstates this visual phenomena at the same time, encapsulates her being in the muddled median between polarities – upon where one can pivot freely to go from either where. It is her unexplored terrain vague she continually trudges and remodels and constructs studies from and for, products uncertain of their end use, limned by colored pencils on sheets of eternal white limbo.

"First Kiss", a digitally manipulated photograph of the artist kissing herself, seems at first misleadingly about identity politics especially when viewed in parallel with the premise of Hitchcock's Vertigo where Kim Novak's doppelganger acts as a surrogate to Scottie's unconsummated desire. But then again, it is very reminiscent as well of Narcissus who drowned to his doom in search of his twin sister.

Doppelgangers have been dealt with by Taniguchi in her show A Ballad of Arbitrary Methods held last year at Theo Gallery in the form of "modestly-sized pair of oil paintings of a Mabini-esque bay scenery of palm trees, nipa hut, and mountain ranges painted in thick black, gray and white placed side by side", each one created to faithfully mimic each other, yet not being exact copies of each one.

The idea of twins and doppelgangers seem at odds with the earlier mentioned concept of grayness and being in the median but it's probably these polarities that informs these and overwhelms Taniguchi's own experience of artistic creation and ideation. Her foray into different media and formats – drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, video – are seeming re-enactments of this dizzying climb through art history, and thence to one's own mythology