Mind Set Art Center is pleased to present “Wear and Tear”, a solo exhibition by Marina Cruz from 10 January to 7 February 2015. As the first exhibition of 2015, “Wear and Tear” is also Curz’s second solo exhibition with Mind Set Art Center following the first one “In the House of Memory” in 2012. You are cordially invited to attend the exhibition and the opening reception starting at 3 pm on Saturday, 10 January.
Rooted deeply in family memory and history, Marina Cruz’s works are endowed with warm emotions while reflecting the colonization, modernization, and economical ups and downs of the Philippines as member of Asia. Dresses made by the artist’s grandmother have become the major subjects of Cruz’s art since their rediscovery by her. The old clothes, mostly dating half a century back to the 1950s and the 1960s, contain stories of three generations of women: made by Cruz’s grandmother for her beloved daughters, and became the rich resource for the grand-daughter’s art.
As presented in the exhibition “Wear and Tear”, Cruz’s fascination on garments continues to fabric’s formal qualities such as texture, patterns, line, color and composition. The paintings display the inside-out of the dresses, the surfaces that actually touch the body of the wearer. Through the artist’s ingenious sectioning and depiction, the dress undulates on the canvas, showing its inner scenery with threads, folds, cuts, and stains. By cropping her subject, enlarging and portraying a focused view of clothing, Cruz abandons the form and shape of the dress in its entirety and is able to give us an introspective space to contemplate on the material’s imperfections that they have been aging over the years. Prints of fabrics emphasizing texture are also presented in this exhibition along with sculptures casted from an actual dress, showing the actual size and space the object such as a tiny dress can occupy and its inherent attribute. Marina Cruz not just deconstructs the dresses’ attributes, qualities and characteristics by using creative choice of art production such as painting, print and sculpture, but also makes us reflect on the inevitable “wear and tear” of the dresses and their wearers.
Born in 1982, Marina Cruz graduated cum laude from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts where she also received her MA in Art Education. She has shown prominently in several exhibitions in Manila and internationally. In 2007, she won both the grand prize of the Philippine Art Awards and the Ateneo Art Awards which gave her the opportunity to attend a fellowship at La Trobe University’s Visual Arts Center in the same year. She was also awarded the Freeman Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in 2008.
