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Mark Valenzuela
April 4 -27, 2009
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"Platoon of Strangers" April 4 - 27, 2009 Platoon of Strangers, Mark Valenzuela's second one-man show at Galleria Duemila, will be open to the public from April 4-27. The show features Valenzuela's recent paintings and modular installations of terracotta. Constructing individual yet obscured human heads, the artist engages the theme of conformity as a form and expression of social alienation. The works reflect on how individuals within society or specific social formations end up becoming strangers to one another. To consciously emphasize the conceptual contrasts between society and the individual, Valenzuela juxtaposes the military term “platoon” (referring to a subdivision of a company of soldiers and connoting a body of people working together towards a specific mission), with the term “stranger”, which denotes a person unfamiliar or external to one's own social circles, a “persona non grata to our being” as the artist terms it. Valenzuela poses the question of whether we indeed know or understand the people and individuals whom we deal with on a daily basis, in various circles and formations within which our lives revolve in. The artist utilizes the traditional and non-industrial medium of terracotta to reflect on the ironic phenomenon of alienation within contemporary society, where wayward industrialization, widening social disparity and globalization has created diverse situations where “groups of people co-exist without knowing each other fully” as the artist observes. The repeated production of terracotta heads reinforces the concept of the social machine churning out more members. The symbolic covering up of their faces denotes the act of turning the familiar into the unknown. What is being obscured are faces, the stamp of individuality and knowing on each person. Mark Valenzuela’s first one-man show, entitled War Zone, was held at Galleria Duemila in 2007. The artist participated in 19 group shows since 2002. He is the recipient of a Sinugdanan grant from the National Commission on Culture and the Arts and has been short-listed for the 2008 Ateneo Art Awards. His collection of works may be viewed at Galleria Duemila.
Platoon of Strangers
opens on April 4 with cocktails at 4 pm at Galleria Duemila,
210 Loring Street, Pasay City. For inquiries, contact
831-9990, telefax 833-9815, email: duemila@mydestiny.net |
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