Manuel Ocampo, David Griggs, MM Yu
Hail to the Nightly Beasts of the Dark Sessions
May 12, 2012 - June 2, 2012
“Hail to the Nightly Beasts of the Dark Sessions”
Manuel Ocampo David Griggs MM Yu
May 12 to June 2, 2012
“Hail to the Nightly Beasts of the Dark Sessions” at the Department of Avant-Garde Clichés (DAGC) Gallery, from May 12 to June 2, 2012, combines the works of Manuel Ocampo, David Griggs, and MM Yu, presenting the hallucinatory state of Imagination’s dark assembly through prints, photos, and video.
A numbing throbbing beat of pleasurable fear shoots in the head when familiarity concedes to the temptations of the absurd. As this particular world unravels contrary to the waking reality, it turns into a panic stricken dream when you’re unable to connect a sensible meaning to the picture. As when continuity is broken by not having rhyme nor reason that can offer comfort. A horned goat child holding a wine bottle seems to levitate upward but runs counter to the flow of the composition, while from below a shit deity is adorned with a dust broom, a spectral tooth, and an indispensable drug injection. Orientation, and context by the same token, is always a question here. Actors happen on a scene unexpectedly as if it shouldn’t be there. While others seem to just wait, forever. A hiking party of tree stumps and shit carrying a slumped hunter and his vampiric snoopy dog halts in front of a monument of modernist futility, an unfulfilled dream that never ends. A spermatozoid eye succumbs to the exhaustion of (pro)creation torn between morality (the cross) and carnality (the sausage). Alcoholic drinks raise the tempo of losing one’s anchor from the threshold of the senses, following the siren’s call of booze to places beyond belief, only to discover the next day that one had actually gone nowhere.
Photographs of discarded furniture and stoic sacks are portrayed with a charming humanity on an otherwise ignoble and forgettable condition. They return us with a gaze that seems to mock and remind us of our own frailty and despair. A video plays of a train on an endless journey ridden by kids wearing grotesque monster masks – the inside coming outside betraying the illusion of innocence, and of the exotic, when things about the landscape reshapes into ghetto hell. While men branded for life takes them out of the arena of the real only to find themselves living within the realm of broken dreams.
Text by ArvinFlores
For more information, please contact the gallery at
+632-8172042/+63916-2459221 or dagcgallery@gmail.com
