Hello Like Before
Clairelynn Uy
October 3 to 22, 2019
“Hello Like Before” is Uy’s homage to the artists who had come before her and had challenged preconceived notions of art; if not for their own struggle for creative independence, art would remain limiting and vulnerable to the set protocols. Here, Uy bridges the idea of how traditional artistic forms such as “Self-Portrait” and “Still Life” can be interpreted without subscribing to the canon. After all, our rendition and perception of reality are our own; it is our duty to make the world recognize it.
As one appreciates the humor in Uy’s works and the artist’s great attention to detail and techniques, the artist reflects back at a time when art seemed rigid to satisfy conservative conventions. A case for example is the controversy at the 1939’s “World’s Fair” in New York where the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí had received censorship for his pavilion from the fair’s chairing committee saying that, “A woman with a tail of a fish is possible; a woman with the head of a fish is impossible.” This referred to Dalí’s interpretation of Sandro Boticcelli’s seminal work, “The Birth of Venus”. As protest, Dalí hired a small plane and dropped copies of his manifesto, “Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and of the Rights of Man to His Own Madness", in which he stated, “The public is infinitely superior to the rubbish that is fed to it daily. The masses have always known where to find true poetry."
-Gwen Bautista