View of “Buen Calubayan: Forms without vanishing points: Diagrams for sensing and becoming,” 2023, UP Vargas Museum, Manila. Photo: Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center, University of the Philippines.
“This reconnaissance begins with the exterior glass walls of the Vargas Museum, which Calubayan has covered with a litany of black, white, and gray vinyl-sticker diagrams: Instructions on Viewing the Landscape, 2015–present, unfurls two arbitrary cartographic diagrams depicting landscape through a rational paradigm of perspective lines and checkered patterns. As we viewed the trees surrounding Vargas through these magnified blueprints, our eyes aligned and deconstructed the terrain against the diagrams’ perpendicular angles, vanishing point, and grid tracks, alluding to how we have been educated—according to Western art’s pillars—to view natural landscapes in a detached and scientific manner, while forfeiting our existence embedded within them.”
Artwork photo provide by Vargas Museum at University of the Philippines, Diliman
Read the full review here at Artforum.
