In 2004, I was given Bjork’s fifth studio album Medulla. I have had a growing interest in the Icelandic musician’s work since her album Post came out in 1995 when I was still ten years old. Medulla was rendered almost entirely with the human voice, an emphasis and homage to the primordial musical device. One of the songs in the album was entitled Mouth’s Cradle, a rather difficult song to sing with unusual and almost cryptic lyrics that I was considerably drawn to. I had learned that the song was about the loyalty of love but it was only until fairly recently that I had begun to understand what it personally meant for me. Since then, the title phrase has taken a life of its own, and has become a personal metaphor. It took so much of my thoughts that I was certain I was going to name my studio after it. Last May, Mouth’s Cradle finally found its space in one of the rooms atop the Turtle’s Nest Book Café and Gallery. It is there that I have created and nurtured my most recent concepts in painting and performance and there that Rocking the Mouth’s Cradle was conceived.
This exhibition is Mouth’s Cradle’s first offering of tangible work. It follows my observations, preoccupations, and intentions that all stem from the connotative ambiguities of the title. Rocking the Mouth’s Cradle may seem to imply only two varying goals; the inducing of sleep thereby fostering a state of stasis and paralysis or the deliverance from the horrors of the waking reality into dreamland- a place where everything can be done, everything is possible.
This polarity, however, is divided even more into the semiotics of the central character, the Mouth’s Cradle: its physical mode as the space that fosters the material manifestations of insight and its more abstract, intangible form as the metaphysical environment that reveals the insight. All these serve as the ontological platform on which the collection imposes a discussion of certain possibilities: the gift and curse that are speech and language, the voices of instinct, the universe, and its messengers, and finally the concurrence of the former and the latter towards illumination and empathy.
It is with great hope and love that I share my thoughts, visions, and dreams on canvas. They do not produce sound nor do they speak but please
listen and listen hard.
The exhibit opens at 6:30pm on the 25th of August at the 856 G Gallery along A.S. Fortuna St. Mandaue, Cebu City. Happy will be making an appearance along with his friends from XO? Performance Art Group.
See you there!
