Ideas as art

We need a leisure pastime to preserve our sanity in this very disturbing period of our history. There’s so much violence and negativity when we watch or read the daily news, assaulting our sense of right and wrong and the principles we hold dear.

We all have our respective hobbies or indulgences that allow us to tune out of reality and to momentarily forget life’s tribulations. The art world is my go-to place when I need to empty my mind of stressful thoughts. Visiting art exhibitions, conversing with artists, and acquiring an artwork when budget allows, have been my coping mechanisms against anxiety.

One of the artists whose monumental works have inspired me to dream of expanding my capacity for creative imagination is Oscar Villamiel. The artist studied fine arts at the University of the East, but for two decades he worked as a set designer and entrepreneur. After gaining success in the shirt-printing business to financially secure his family, he returned to his first love as a visual artist in 2006.

While Villamiel creates wall-bound works of art, the most impressive of his oeuvre are his large-scale installations using salvaged materials he passionately collects over many years. He has accumulated discarded dolls, bull horns, scrap iron nails, bird feathers, cigarette butts and flood-damaged books, to produce remarkable art assemblages and installations that have very compelling social and political narratives.

In 2013, Villamiel’s art installation titled “Payatas” was exhibited in the Singapore Biennale. The installation consisted of thousands of thrown-away dolls collected from the giant garbage dump in Payatas, Quezon City, which is home to an estimated 200,000 people, many of whom survive as scavengers.

The large room devoted to Villamiel’s installation in the Singapore Art Museum was dimly lit and the viewer walked through a path, the sides of which were filled with doll heads excavated from the landfill and propped at eye level on bamboo poles. It was a very unsettling scene, but it became even more eerie as the path led to a bahay kubo whose walls were inhabited by smiling dolls, all of them with sullied traces of their dumpsite origin, and most of them disfigured with a missing arm, leg or eye, or stripped of hair or clothing.

“Payatas” is a very powerful work of the imagination that presents a haunting slice of life in the “landscape of refuse,” and evokes parallelisms with the lives of those caught in the quagmire of grinding poverty.

In 2014, Villamiel mounted a show called “Mga Damong Ligaw” where he sprawled on a gallery floor space the 10,000 carabao and cow horns he had obsessively collected over nine years. The bull horns appeared like wild weeds in foreboding dark color.

The installation visually communicated Villamiel’s “expressed dismay over corrupt politicians, abusive police and dishonest taxi drivers.” “Ito silang lahat, mga damong ligaw (This is all that they are, wild weeds),” he was quoted in a BusinessWorld interview.

In 2018, Villamiel exhibited another impressive opus titled “Black Forest,” made of rusted and crooked iron nails harvested from demolished houses. Villamiel collected the scrap nails from junkyards over a period of five years. The nails were then welded on top of one another to form totem poles that were made to appear like young trees standing more than six feet tall. The thousands of mimicked slender trees stood on a bed of charcoal.

Villamiel’s forest was “a grim reinterpretation of the archipelago’s denuded and rapidly disappearing forests,” and it’s “a field of grim signs: reminders of what remains after cyclical histories of extraction, exploitation and deprivation,” wrote Lisa Ito in the exhibition notes.

Villamiel’s use of ordinary materials and thrown-away objects to convey ideas as art expands artistic expression beyond the traditional forms of painting, drawing and sculpture. It inspires mortals like me, bereft of talent and training in the arts, to dream of expanding my field of expression well beyond the limits of words on paper.

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