by Make the apartment a better place with a cardboard box. Draw a tree of your imagination or you can see. Have fun and clean up.
These are some of the instructions that you will follow when you visit the Bundanon Art Museum on the New South Wales South Coast in the coming months. If you accept, you will be part of a new large-scale installation of the husband-born husband-woman artist duos Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, who explores the tree as a symbol of home and community.
“We really love to involve everyone in the actual process of work,” says Isabel. “It demystifies the idea of art as individual persecution.”
The reflections/habitats of the Aquilizans are part of the group exhibition of Bundanon: exchange with the natural world and consists of two parts: a wall of drawings and a large-scale “accumulative” sculpture of a converted tree, which is covered with a grid of wooden rays that are covered with small cardboard sculptures. Visitors are invited to create their own sculptures and drawings in the adjacent gallery, which can be added to the installation in the course of the exhibition.
“It is such a generous offer you make,” says Sophie O’Brien, Bundanon’s head of curatorial and learn, “that means:” We will work together “.
By greeting the audience in the cooperation of the Aquilizans, hope that the trees or life houses will offer for people and non-people? How are the deforestation and overdevelopment connected? And what does it mean to create a “home”?
This last question is one who has asked the Aquilizans and their audience since 2006 when they moved to Australia with their five children. From this point on, Home has always been a recurring story in our work, “says Isabel -” Because we are migrants, “adds Alfredo. They joke in their characteristic warm and self-ironic way that they now have three citizens-as Filipinos, Australians and Seniors.
One of the first explorations of the Aquilizans of “Home” was the Sydney Biennale, which coincided with their move. “We always try our story, what happens, our art and our life are never separated,” says Isabel.
Your Biennalinstallation, Projektbe-Longing: In Transit, documenting your move to Australia over 12 decent stacks of personal objects, whereby each perfect cube created the illusion that the box of a packaging box had disappeared to reveal its content. References to the Filipino Migrant tradition of sending Balikbayan (Return home) boxes with objects to family members and was a deeply personal portrait of a house in the river.
Many of the works of the Aquilizans rely on everyday objects, including tangas, bed sheets and sickles. However, their large -scale cardboard sculptures, which were built with the participation of the community (as in Bundanon), for which they are best known.
They pursue their interest in creating their roots in Southeast Asia, where parts and helpers of another part of everyday life as well as for their five children, who were involved in their parents at a young age. This has continued to adulthood, and the family is now working as “a kind of collective,” says Isabel.
In the past two decades, the Aquilizan iterations of their striking short -lived sculptures with a large number of communities have built up almost every continent of large institutions such as the art gallery of NSW, the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands and the Museum Macan in Indonesia as well as in the areas of community.
Perhaps the most important co-made carton work is in the Habit: Project Another Land, a multi-year travel sculpture that began in 2010. How they went on tour and added by various audiences in Australia, Japan, Indonesia, Philippines and many other countries-it enables its issues of changes, shit and settlements.
Reflections/residents are similar in relation to their earlier sculptures, but reflect an expansion of their ideas all over the homeland in order to include nature, especially trees and roofs. “This exhibition asks everyone not only within, but also to reflect, but also what happens around us,” says Alfredo.
It feels appropriate that the Aquilizans in Bundanon, the former house of the prominent husband and wife, Arthur and Yvonne Boyd, means “home”. The Boyds saw their home as somewhere where they promote a creative community, protect the environment and leave a permanent legacy for Australian culture. “They knew from the start that they would reveal it,” says O’Brien. “Arthur has spent years expanding paintings in order to be able to afford it, to repay and give them [to the Australian government, in 1993]. It was a real social project. “
If I ask you the question of Aquilizan – “What does you mean for you at home?” – Talk of your decision to return to the Philippines in 2024. “We have the feeling that we can do more if they are there,” they say. “We have political problems, economic problems and so on – at the end of the day you cannot simply rely on the system. You have to find alternative ways to do things. “
For this purpose, you are currently building a new collective work area, a studio and a new home that supports local craftsmen and preserves endangered craft skills through art projects and international collaborations.
Like the Boyds, the Aquilizans recognize the power of the art market to support their endeavors. While you have historically not made commercial works, you are increasingly working with local metalsmiths, craftsmen and newly painted farmers and your Ames Yavuz gallery to create collectibles that often come from your common sculptures for details and inspiration.
So: If you contribute to your sculpture in Bundanon, a small part of your work beyond the exhibition can live over the exhibition to create a generous extended term who and what art is and what can be a home.
