by Leonard We've all heard the stereotype of the "wacky inventor". Doc Brown from 'Back To The Future'. Albert Einstein. Most of the people that go on 'Dragon's Den'. Are inventors always wacky? What constitutes wacky and what's the dividing line between wacky an brilliant? And why does brilliance always mean big hair (Romeo Candido, you need a haircut.)?
But really, comparing hair to wackyness and brilliance is WAY too easy a tangent to begin this post on Kilusan Collective Artist Jeff Garcia, whose art is up with the rest of the Kilusan gang at Rolly's Garage this week.
So I'm going to start over. Sorry.
Hmm. OK, so the story begins around 200 AD when the Chinese (not the Filipinos) created Woodblock Printing. Fast forward about 800 years and then you have the first instance of Movable Type (sigh. Again, not us). Movable type is just that, you can move the characters around depending on what you want to print -- pretty good if you don't want to have a bunch of ink-stained wood blocks laying around. Fast-forward through Lithography, Chromolithography, Mimeography... then somewhere between Offset Printing and Phototypesetting, we have -- Screen Printing.
From the wiki page: Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil.
Here's where Jeff Garcia comes in. Thing is, he's sort of a guru at this. Jeff (along with his partner-in-print Jan Avendano run Halo Halo Screen Printing at 401 Richmond and they put on a huge show back in March.
Jeff didn't create Screen Printing, but he's awful good at it. Much better than my photography skills. Again, I take shit pictures so you're going to have to go to Rolly's Garage yourself this week to check out the Kilusan Exhibit. It's up until Carlos Celdran's If These Walls Could Talk takes over the space on May 22-23. I can't really talk about it too much, because really you just gotta see it... but I will say this: its thematically based on an annual parade where people in with dark skin and flamboyant costumes dance in the streets to loud percussive music (and I don't mean Caribana).
If you're lucky, Jeff might decide to serve Halo Halo at his NEXT show -- and that IS a Filipino Creation, so NYAH NYEAH NYEAAH, Ancient Chinese.
—-The Details—-
TORONTO, MEET MANILA, MANILA, MEET TORONTO…
May 15 – 23, 2009 Weekday Gallery hours: 3PM – 8PM
Five artists. Two cities. One crazy exchange.
{ Alex Felipe }{ Ilona Fiddy }{ Jeff Garcia }{ Jennifer Maramba}{Tiffany Naval Jr}
with special international guest artist: { Carlos Celdran }
What happens when you take a group of Canadian-born Filipino artists and throw them across the ocean to go face-to-face with the land that they were raised by, but never knew?
THE PURPOSE Explore the story to be told of having one identity rooted in two cultures
THE PROCESS A trip to the Philippine metropolis of Manila An intense exchange with Carlos Celdran, the dubbed “Pied Piper of Manila” And the integration of it all back into the Canadian metropolis of Toronto
THE RESULT A multimedia & multi-perspective cultural art show-of-sorts.
May 15 – 23, 2009 Weekday Gallery hours: 3PM – 8PM
MAY 20 (TONITE!) Artist Talk with Carlos Celdran 630pm
May 22 & 23, 8PM : Spoken word, multi-media rendition of famous Intramuros tour by Carlos Celdran