Christina Dy: Unfurling The Folds On Her Sunday’s Best

Christina Dy's practice, spanning a decade or so, seem to evolve around feats of endurance and feats of physical strains.  They evidence a series of calculated performative acts that veer on the ritualistic and the hermetic. The drawings serve as a record keeping of the hours and days spent, it bears being the sole witness to a back breaking effort in completing them.  Here a surface of charcoal transforming by foot space to a massive terrain of hair, to a whirlpool of clouds, to a carpet of rippling ocean waves, blanketing an eremite’s cubic island.   

It’s a physicality buttressed on magnanimity, pitting scale with the limits of materiality and human frailty. Paper and flesh, pulp and bones, contained or contorted, folded or unfurled, analogies contrasted with the wielder and her material, with object and subject converging into form. A series of these actions fan out as shaded creases, invoking rocks, butterfly wings, petals, clothing, muscles, ligature, epidermis.  She draws out the exhaustion with her body as form, body as tool, body as machine, body as ground, body as a delineation of topography of interpersonal relationships as it traverses with other bodies, body as a trace of a precise choreography and rigid routine. As paper folds and fans out into valley and mountains, to pleats or creases, body contorts into poses – sitting, standing, lying, kneeling, crouching, a panoply of micro movements that clamber up into a heroics of exertion battling vastness and particularities, limits and endlessness, infinity scaled to mathematical configurations, a plane’s perspective multiplied into tesseracted Eschers.   

Christina Dy unfurls a suite of these drawings that encompass her transition from large-scale format pictures of the seas and skies, to intimate-scaled sketches of nudes, to her more recent exploration of drawing on folded paper that are configured into tangram puzzle pieces. With the myriad scale of her works, they also manifest the different drawing techniques she employs relative to the format and subject of her works – from brooding gray shades of graphite and charcoal of macro views of surfaces, to fine linear renderings of the human anatomy and insect appendages with a mechanical pencil. Archivo 1984 presents for the first time these drawings that show Christina’s kaleidoscopic practice, as an artist and as a performer/dancer, and breaking frontiers between such.

Christina Dy is a recipient of the CCP 13 Artist Award in 2009, and was shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards in 2008 and in 2009.  She had been exhibiting since 2003, and was a participant in the Busan Biennale in 2010, in Paris Photo in 2013, in Beyond Frame: Philippine Photomedia in UTS Gallery in Sydney in 2008.  

Unfurling The Folds On Her Sunday’s Best is her 15th solo exhibit.

Christina Dy : Unfurling The Folds On Her Sunday’s Best

Archivo 1984, 2241 La Fuerza Compound 1, Makati City

14 October - 2 November 2017

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