Familiar Faces
Yvonne Quisumbing explores the space in between the face and the mask – mapping the terrain of contention between the self and the other. Prior to her series of paintings of men and women with opulent headgears in 2016 was a collection of faces covered with sheaths in 2009. Noticeably subdues, the thin cloth stretched over the human face thoroughly reduces it to an anthropomorphic silhouette. These were the blank canvasses where she started conducting her introspective inquiry into fashion and facade and the human condition/ing almost a decade ago. Man is a social animal wont to adapt through compliance to society. The artist continues to tease out this narrative through representations of masks, casting doubt upon the assumption that these are external embellishments and instead, “secretions of ideology”constituting the human him/herself. – Adjani Arumpac
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