Asia

Gary-Ross Pastrana

Rewilding

2018

Rewilding, 2018 (still)

Gary-Ross Pastrana’s video installation Rewilding consists of three large-scale projections placed across the exhibition space. The poetic footage filmed by the artist portrays three interconnected worlds: a colony of termites; a piano repair workshop in the outskirts of Manila; and an empty concert theatre. Their interconnectivity is shaped by the voice-over of three narrators: a musician discussing the balance between order and chaos found in classical music; a piano repairman describing termite infestations in an instrument of European origin; and a scientist describing the unique social structures of this tropical parasite. As the time-lapse of the films progresses, the sound intensity of the piano keys crescents, while increasingly active behavior from the termites appears on screen. In the societal structures of termites, subjects can become kings or queens if any of them dies, a sharp contrast to the feudal neo-colonial hierarchical society of the Philippines.

Gary-Ross Pastrana is an artist interested in the philosophies of art and the epistemologies of the art object. His unique conceptualist practice, often addressing destruction and mutation of material, differs from the more symbolic, allegorical, nation-building art practices largely found in contemporary Filipino art. Therefore the relevancy of Pastrana’s work lies in the artist’s experimentation with more subtle and poetic languages involving non-linear moving images and other fields of knowledge, such as music and science. The way that classical music appears in his work can be seen in relation to a number of contemporary artists interested in its sonic value and embodied (colonial) history of westernization. Pastrana’s work is also a sophisticated approach to the dichotomy of culture and nature, and to current relevant sociological discourse on humanity’s relationship to non-human animals.

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Gary-Ross Pastrana Rewilding

Gary-Ross Pastrana

Rewilding