NOTE: An old piece remembered because Oca Villamiel’s “Back To Nature” just ended its run at Finale Art File, and still takes from this kind of magnitude. 

In 2012, I happened upon Oca Villamiel’s “Stories Of Our Time,” which was a deceptively simple set of art assemblages made from old dolls, with expectedly missing heads and limbs. I was on a gallery run with Singapore art journalist Mayo Martin, driving all the way to Fairview for Light and Space Contemporary to prove a point: look at how large this city is, and how difficult it is to even look at all exhibits at any given time. It’s so unlike Singapore! I was telling Mayo.

But of course there’s the kind of art one encounters in Manila so distinctly different from SG. Specifically, there was Villamiel’s work, filling up the various galleries of this art space, playing with old dolls not just through framed and contained assemblages, but also by filling up a whole space with dolls hanging from the ceiling. The effect was an eerie curtain of bright wide eyes and lifeless bodies.

We were on our way out when someone from Light and Space told us there was more outside, in one of the warehouse-spaces. We followed him down some steps, and as he opened the warehouse doors, our jaws dropped. Within that large space was a garden-like installation of doll’s heads and body parts attached to flimsy sticks. At the center of this garden was a shanty filled with dolls and doll parts. Walking around the garden, walls were filled with shadows of uncanny flowers and growth, almost pretty, absolutely breathtaking. This work was entitled “Payatas.” (more…)