?Beyond Frame: Philippine Photomedia? presents a multi-layered survey of Philippine contemporary practice in the field
PHOTOGRAPHY IS THE MOST ubiquitous medium of our time, from the advertising billboards that dominate the skyline of Metro Manila to social networking sites where netizens share their life experiences through snapshots.

Photography has expanded its role from documentation to art medium.

Contemporary artists now turn to photomedia with the same ease they do to painting or installation, exploring the possibilities of photography and its allied processes.

Directions

In ?Beyond Frame: Philippine Photomedia,? the exhibition?s curator Gina Fairley, a writer for Asian Art News specializing in Southeast Asia, brings together works by photographers and artists working in the photomedia genre to present a picture of the directions the medium has taken in contemporary Philippine setting.

She sets the tone of layering with MM Yu?s Memoirs, a colorful patchwork of more than 200 double exposed prints installed like wallpaper?the pictures reflective of the way we remember things or places, not as isolated incidents but as a multi-layered moment.

In a burgundy-colored room, Fairley groups glam shots of beauty queens from the ?70s taken by Mario Co, Steve Tirona?s famous series of digitally manipulated Imelda Marcos photos in self-parody, and MM Yu?s X, discarded studio portraits of people with eyes half-closed.

Together, the works confront us with our ideas of glamour, our desire to be remembered in an almost artificial state of beauty, and society?s unquenchable desire for images that attempt to satiate.

In a small room, a sense of calm descends with Lani Maetro?s video installation ?A Voice Remembers Nothing.?

Mundane

Grouped in another room are images of the more mundane, although you wouldn?t know it from the way Rachel Rillo, Poklong Anading and Gerardo Tan present them. Each artist respectively lifts the tangled wires of Manila, the lowly ?trapo,? and house dust out of their usual context.

Tan?s large book ?Dust to Dust? is a compilation of photos taken of a specific spot in his house over the course of 100 days.

Scattered on the floor of a darkened room are Anading?s light boxes that call to mind the advertising billboards lighting up the Metro Manila night sky. But instead of clothes and cosmetics, what he presents are individual ?trapos,? circular rags of patched-together fabric remnants that are littered on the streets.

Rillo?s tiny photos of overhead wires resembling pen and ink drawings expose the artist?s ability to find something of interest and beauty in what usually represents the tangled mess of the Third World.

?Pairs??a series of photos of gloves, earrings, salt and pepper shakers?a collaborative work by Ringo Bunoan and Gary Ross Pastrana, shares an affinity with the sentiments raised by the works of Rillo and Anading, that questioning of the values that we attribute to objects.

In the main gallery are the ?architectural? shots. Lena Cobangbang?s ?Castle? is a five-foot high, digitally manufactured ?landscape? photograph dominated by a gigantic pink cake of gelatin, standing out like a massive structure in the urban landscape.

Across this, in an equally imposing scale, is Romina Diaz?s picture of a sleeping child curled in a cardboard box.

Gateway

Serving as a gateway into the next gallery is Tony Twigg?s installation of ?found timber.?

The photos are what he calls ?accidental art,? vignettes of the urban landscape that, seen through a viewfinder, have a ?strong compositional effect.?

In this gallery are the works of Christina Dy and Norberto Roldan, two artists who use photos as the starting point for their work, but magnify them through drawing or painting.

Dy is known for her large-scale drawings of blown-up heads of hair and imagined flora. Here, drawn directly onto the wall are the waves of Sydney?s famous bay, magnified from the original 3R sized photo.

Roldan?s ?Mass? presents images he?s painted from archival photos recording the audience of a nuclear test at sea. By magnifying the photo, he heightens the strangeness of the scene where people relax on lounge chairs in Bermuda shorts while witnessing a demonstration of man?s destructive power.

Gina Osterloh?s ?Dots Front Misfire? is a fitting end piece to the expanded understanding of more conceptual photography. It is a photograph of a small room covered in strips of pink, blue and yellow paper, in the center of which crouches a camouflaged mannequin, fully covered in spots of the same material and colors.

It speaks of the Filipino-American experience of returning to a country that is so familiar, that makes up so much of you, but not being able to totally assimilate. A world away from Mario Co?s 1970s portraits of beauty queens, it nicely rounds up the survey of Philippine contemporary photomedia practice.

The exhibit is ongoing at the Ateneo Art Gallery till Dec. 12.