Yasmin Sison
The Punky Brewster Session
24 May – 11 June 2007  
 
Memory, presence and the various excisions of these are explored in The Punky Brewster Session, Yasmin Sison’s latest one-woman exhibition at Mag:net Katipunan.   

Sison exhibits paintings in oil on canvas, ranging in size from 6 x 4 ft. and 3 x 4 ft., which the artist considers as a “continuation of previous works that deal with memory, collective memory and the mutability of memories and thus its inherent possibilities”.  

In her previous show entitled Unmade (this time at Mag:net Paseo last year), Sison “covers up supposed personages” whose photographs fill the pages of found fashion magazines, rendering them anonymous, cut out and erased from the pretty picture plane. Barely a year later, her follow-up exhibition ventures beyond the confines of pictorial shoots and comfortable interiors. It features works that focus on the people either engaged in acts or located at the peripheries of sites which can be initially associated with amusement and fun: the carnival grounds, an unmade bed ready for a sleep-over session, a classroom in a state of disarray.  

But more than to merely effect a change of scenery, the works dare disturb. Though the artist professes that the series is perhaps “more about…images that have a [sense of] play”—her take on the formal aspects of the work emphasizes the process of creating negative images from cut outs “that tend to look like a grade school project”—one can not help but sense the incidental social irony denoted by the show. For Sison’s paintings—which deal with excisions of bodies and presences—are being exhibited at a political and social period rife with intermittent reports of human rights violations: mutilations, erasures of words and lives, literal disappearances and rub-outs.  At a time when the body count of desaparedicos (a Spanish term referring to South American victims of state terrorism and later assimilated into the Philippines during Martial Law) has reached over 200 since Arroyo took over the Palace seat back in 2001, the paintings indirectly recall the memory—no matter how suppressed—of how people are being mutilated, made to disappear, and similarly excised inside classrooms, homes and malls.  

Whether Sison intentionally alludes to this or not, the 1980s American sitcom Punky Brewster (from which the exhibition derives its title) ironically revolves around the life of a little girl whose parents have disappeared and abandoned her while still an infant. Sison may have initially chosen the title based on the effects of colors and textures utilized in her works (defining these as more of a “pop song more than an opera” if made into a song), but this whimsical and innocent juxtaposition of the works in the context of the ongoing human rights crisis make the irony of all this seem grimmer. What is being exhibited, thus, is not only a conceptual representation of a grade school project, but documentary evidences of Mutilation: a defacement of form, recollection, and presence. More than being formal exercises in visual perception, the works are indirect reminders that life outside the gallery, unlike in TV sitcoms, does not always end up with happy, picture-perfect endings.  

Yasmin Sison studied Humanities and Fine Arts (majoring in Painting) at the University of the Philippines. She was a member of the artists’ group which managed the alternative art space Surrounded By Water from the late 1990s to early 2000. She was a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award in 2006. Sison is also an art educator, having taught Fine Arts at St. Scholastica’s College, and at a Cavite-based preparatory school.  

The Punky Brewster Session by Yasmin Sison runs frm May 24 to June 11, 2007 at Mag:net Gallery Katipunan, located at  335 AGCOR Building, Katipunan Avenue, Loyola Heights, Quezon City.  For inquiry call 9293191 or email magnetcafekatips@yahoo.com.ph or visit www.magnet.com.ph