While it seemed that the whole neighborhood took to the cemeteries on the day of the dead, I stayed home and, like a neglected child, played with matches.
With an oil lamp, I burned boxes of them, stick by stick. I tried to burn them slowly, making sure each turns black evenly and not get burned enough to crumble into ash. Then I dropped each charred stick into ice-tea glass bottles and added a few more items: an unfinished cigar in one bottle, a handful of opened safety pins and cotton in another, and uncooked rice in still another.
A fourth bottle was filled with a mix of clay and torn bits of newspapers and my wife’s music notes of a Bach minuet that she just discarded into a trash can. I then filled half of the bottle with water and inserted a few monggo seeds that I hope will bud in a few days.
I handed out these bottles to Fr. Jason Dy, SJ, an artist who is also one of the priests in the Sacred Heart Parish. The art bottles are among the many others he collected from artist friends and parishioners for his exhibit of installations titled “In Loving Memory III.”
The show, which runs from Nov. 5 through Nov. 27 at the Sacred Heart Parish Alternative Art Studio, is Fr. Jason’s “tribute to the faithfully departed with bottles, prayers, and souvenirs of the dead.”
For years now, the artist-priest has been recycling ice tea bottles as alternative to canvas, as mediums for reaching out to souls, in keeping with the tradition of distressed people sending out an SOS in bottles floated in the sea.
Once again, in this show he asks people to turn bottles into souvenirs of their beloved dead. As expected they turned in bottles already containing little things like letters, photographs, drawings, and rosaries, small toys, and other mementos.
Artists embellished their bottles with paintings or turned them into assemblage or conceptual art pieces as they dedicate them to their dead relatives, friends, and fellow artists.
My own share of bottles were thus dedicated to my dead maternal grandparents who smoked tobacco (and perhaps, partly died due to it) and whose house burned down because their small grandchildren (my cousins) played with matches for a shadow play; and to my friend Cynthia, a lawyer and pianist, who was one of those killed in the Maguindanao massacre.
I tried to avoid the obvious reference to art by simply using the clear glass vessel to contain objects that do not always relate to each other, and thus allowing its ambiguity to force us to think in a more metaphorical level.
I find that this conceptual approach reflects the spirit of Fr. Jason’s show which tries to imply a narrative about how we feel and think about the death and the afterlife through a collection of solicited, borrowed, or found objects arranged in a gallery.
In this solo show, for instance, Fr. Jason installs on the gallery floor broken pieces of tombstone markers found in a public cemetery. A wall filled with Mass petitions becomes a background for a broken sculpture of crucified Christ attached on it.
Other art bottles from Fr. Jason’s previous series shown in past exhibitions including “Arte+Fe,” an avant garde Christian art show in Madrid, Spain during the last World Youth Day are also featured in the exhibit, which is curated by JV Castro, a fresh art management graduate of Ateneo de Manila who has been curating shows by Cebuano artists here and in Manila.
This is an important show in this season of remembering the dead. Rarely do we encounter an exhibit that aims merely to make a statement through a spectacle and not to sell. And what makes it even more unique is the fact that it happens in a church garage turned gallery. It does not always happen that a church hosts an art exhibit, much less an avant garde one.
But, as in the exhibit in Madrid, this exhibit proves that the faith shaped by the changing conditions of our time ought to find its best expression in the language of contemporary art. As the church now opens up in the spirit of love and respect, so should our view of art.
Still, it may not be that easy to start to make people, within or outside the church, change their mind. And for that, we raise our bottles for Fr. Jason.