Primal Salvo in Vibracolor

Dina Gadia
Silverlens, Manila

Installation Views

About

    William Burroughs will be name-checked at some point, figured might as well front-load it, and in the manner of laying down the law at that. There are other referents, of course, but Burroughs is the source of the Nile, so to speak. His influence over many things has been so over-emphasized as to reek almost of cliché and certainly of laziness to invoke, but it’s impossible to avoid. What’s relevant here is his central process, the cut-up technique, which involved the inserting of other people’s text into his own and a shape- shifting of form as an aftermath, a literary method that smacked of ritual, of casting the runes. No wonder he nursed this adamant belief that it was a conduit to sorcery and who’s to say it isn’t. More pragmatically, it was the primordial voltage for mash-up culture, and you can sense its trace elements in everything from plunder-phonics to fan fiction to hip-hop. But his name comes up, too, out of how he had this obvious kinship with pulp, with science-fiction and horror primarily, with superheroes and erotica, with its flamboyance and hysteria.

    The relevance of Burroughs goes beyond how the title of Dina Gadia’s new show, Primal Salvo in Vibracolor, has all the shock and tang of a Burroughs title, which of course it isn’t. Pulp is also the base matter of her collages and paintings and installations, and her fundamental process the mash-up, willfully mismatched juxtapositions of art and copy. The art here being dated, banal images from old encyclopedias and lifestyle magazines and vintage advertising, which are in and of themselves, signifiers of conflicting modes: utopia and repression, obsolescence and nostalgia, death and memory. The copy being garish and bombastic pulp titles, some taken verbatim and some themselves mashed up, serving as commentary, as counterpoint, as annotation, as re-contextualization, as punch line.

    And that last qualifier is far from a dis, given how the sense of humor in the work is prevalent to the point of being insidious, another thing it shares with Burroughs, more so when it leans towards a queasy strangeness, which it does most of the time: the panther growling over the dinner table spoils in Fangs Into You, the caveman lugging hollow blocks in Everything In Modernation, the spiritualists trying to exorcise the blancmange in The Spoiler and those creepy hairy things in the two works called The Hair! The Hairrrr!. In some cases, though, the humor achieves the give-and-take immediacy of a stand-up routine. There’s the matinee idol lothario peeking out of the garish pink bed as the Tagalog word for “hell” floats ominously in Let the Love Flow. And the dolled-up socialite, dressed in minty cobras with the word “karanasan” (“experience”) emblazoned underneath in Display of Hard-Earned Callousness. Or the three manicured men having a laugh in nothing but their undies, immaculately bereft of wrinkles, under the insinuating logo of the defunct Manhunter comic. And in A Cultural Weekend Exploitation Away, the word “holiday” hovers gleefully over a cartoon model peddling a cannibal rite like a game show girl. There are nuances to mine here, sure. The “ho hum” sign in We All End with Lines of Aging Cliché I is a riposte to the ubiquity and dominance of the Hollywood sign, which it emulates in size. And the two young girls in We All End with Lines of Ending Cliché II and shackled by the anchor they hug for comfort and safety. Ultimately, its collective dialectical urge has to do with bashing the stereotype, taking it apart and putting it together again. But like any good routine, elaborating further would neuter the buzz, like having to explain the joke.

    Fast and cheap and out of control: there’s a catch-all that nails the quintessential ethos of pulp. You could nail the quintessence of Gadia’s work here with it, too.

    The thing it slightly misses, on both occasions, is the vibrancy. There is a tawdriness on the surface, sure, but that tawdriness is as much an aesthetic directive as it is a function of osmosis, and it is a tawdriness that is not without its charms. Just as Burroughs recognized a visceral potency in the pulp he revered and appropriated, so does Gadia, and she seems fueled here by her desire to revel in the relative rawness and ugliness of her chosen subjects, aiming as she is for that boiling point in pulp where process becomes product and where “bad” bubbles over into “good”. In many ways, she’s trying to replicate her own pleasures with it and in many ways, she has. Primal Salvo in Vibracolor deserves the Burroughsian allusion. And as mutated and recombinant as its pulp is, it has all its prime qualities: fast, cheap and out of control, right. As deep-seated as its resonances run, its delights are immediate and it’s funny as all hell.

    Words by Dodo Dayao

    Most of my works for this show incorporate text inspired from B-movie title designs / title openers. I am fascinated with the mismatching imagery and the wrong timing of the title designs from opening scene. Same with the use of images in my work accompanied with the banality of vintage print ads and editorials from magazine and images from outdated encyclopedia and picture books engaged to the absurd titles (both invented and salvaged as is) from 50s-80s local and foreign horror, adventure and romance comics. Or vice versa.

    Works on collage, painting and installation enthralled by the less publicized forms of pop culture and forgotten mass media prints, these old and clichéd forms are remolded and infused to create a new representation with an unbridled desire to exploit and entertain (by some means be less boring), reaching downward towards new nadir. Like a cult film, I choose my work to remain in the “so bad it’s so good” variety. I want it raw, bad and tough yet funny.

    Dina Gadia
    Primal Salvo in Vibracolor
    May 2012

William Burroughs will be name-checked at some point, figured might as well front-load it, and in the manner of laying down the law at that. There are other referents, of course, but Burroughs is the source of the Nile, so to speak. His influence over many things has been so over-emphasized as to reek almost of cliché and certainly of laziness to invoke, but it’s impossible to avoid. What’s relevant here is his central process, the cut-up technique, which involved the inserting of other people’s text into his own and a shape- shifting of form as an aftermath, a literary method that smacked of ritual, of casting the runes. No wonder he nursed this adamant belief that it was a conduit to sorcery and who’s to say it isn’t. More pragmatically, it was the primordial voltage for mash-up culture, and you can sense its trace elements in everything from plunder-phonics to fan fiction to hip-hop. But his name comes up, too, out of how he had this obvious kinship with pulp, with science-fiction and horror primarily, with superheroes and erotica, with its flamboyance and hysteria.

The relevance of Burroughs goes beyond how the title of Dina Gadia’s new show, Primal Salvo in Vibracolor, has all the shock and tang of a Burroughs title, which of course it isn’t. Pulp is also the base matter of her collages and paintings and installations, and her fundamental process the mash-up, willfully mismatched juxtapositions of art and copy. The art here being dated, banal images from old encyclopedias and lifestyle magazines and vintage advertising, which are in and of themselves, signifiers of conflicting modes: utopia and repression, obsolescence and nostalgia, death and memory. The copy being garish and bombastic pulp titles, some taken verbatim and some themselves mashed up, serving as commentary, as counterpoint, as annotation, as re-contextualization, as punch line.

And that last qualifier is far from a dis, given how the sense of humor in the work is prevalent to the point of being insidious, another thing it shares with Burroughs, more so when it leans towards a queasy strangeness, which it does most of the time: the panther growling over the dinner table spoils in Fangs Into You, the caveman lugging hollow blocks in Everything In Modernation, the spiritualists trying to exorcise the blancmange in The Spoiler and those creepy hairy things in the two works called The Hair! The Hairrrr!. In some cases, though, the humor achieves the give-and-take immediacy of a stand-up routine. There’s the matinee idol lothario peeking out of the garish pink bed as the Tagalog word for “hell” floats ominously in Let the Love Flow. And the dolled-up socialite, dressed in minty cobras with the word “karanasan” (“experience”) emblazoned underneath in Display of Hard-Earned Callousness. Or the three manicured men having a laugh in nothing but their undies, immaculately bereft of wrinkles, under the insinuating logo of the defunct Manhunter comic. And in A Cultural Weekend Exploitation Away, the word “holiday” hovers gleefully over a cartoon model peddling a cannibal rite like a game show girl. There are nuances to mine here, sure. The “ho hum” sign in We All End with Lines of Aging Cliché I is a riposte to the ubiquity and dominance of the Hollywood sign, which it emulates in size. And the two young girls in We All End with Lines of Ending Cliché II and shackled by the anchor they hug for comfort and safety. Ultimately, its collective dialectical urge has to do with bashing the stereotype, taking it apart and putting it together again. But like any good routine, elaborating further would neuter the buzz, like having to explain the joke.

Fast and cheap and out of control: there’s a catch-all that nails the quintessential ethos of pulp. You could nail the quintessence of Gadia’s work here with it, too.

The thing it slightly misses, on both occasions, is the vibrancy. There is a tawdriness on the surface, sure, but that tawdriness is as much an aesthetic directive as it is a function of osmosis, and it is a tawdriness that is not without its charms. Just as Burroughs recognized a visceral potency in the pulp he revered and appropriated, so does Gadia, and she seems fueled here by her desire to revel in the relative rawness and ugliness of her chosen subjects, aiming as she is for that boiling point in pulp where process becomes product and where “bad” bubbles over into “good”. In many ways, she’s trying to replicate her own pleasures with it and in many ways, she has. Primal Salvo in Vibracolor deserves the Burroughsian allusion. And as mutated and recombinant as its pulp is, it has all its prime qualities: fast, cheap and out of control, right. As deep-seated as its resonances run, its delights are immediate and it’s funny as all hell.

Words by Dodo Dayao

Most of my works for this show incorporate text inspired from B-movie title designs / title openers. I am fascinated with the mismatching imagery and the wrong timing of the title designs from opening scene. Same with the use of images in my work accompanied with the banality of vintage print ads and editorials from magazine and images from outdated encyclopedia and picture books engaged to the absurd titles (both invented and salvaged as is) from 50s-80s local and foreign horror, adventure and romance comics. Or vice versa.

Works on collage, painting and installation enthralled by the less publicized forms of pop culture and forgotten mass media prints, these old and clichéd forms are remolded and infused to create a new representation with an unbridled desire to exploit and entertain (by some means be less boring), reaching downward towards new nadir. Like a cult film, I choose my work to remain in the “so bad it’s so good” variety. I want it raw, bad and tough yet funny.

Dina Gadia
Primal Salvo in Vibracolor
May 2012

Works

Dina Gadia
A Cultural Weekend Exploitation Away
2012
2579
2
collage
6.75h x 8.25w in • 17.15h x 20.96w cm
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Dina Gadia
Abominable Position
2012
2580
2
collage
8.25h x 10.50w in • 20.96h x 26.67w cm
-1
0.00
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0
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Dina Gadia
Abomination in Style
2012
2581
2
collage
8h x 10.75w in • 20.32h x 27.31w cm
0
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Dina Gadia
Deep Waters of Fine Art
2012
2582
2
collage
6h x 8.25w in • 15.24h x 20.96w cm
1
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Dina Gadia
Delinquently Yours
2012
2583
2
collage
14h x 11w in • 35.56h x 27.94w cm
-1
0.00
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0
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Dina Gadia
Display of Hard-earned Callousness
2012
2584
2
collage
11.75h x 8.75w in • 29.85h x 22.23w cm
1
0.00
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Dina Gadia
Everything in Modernation I
2012
2585
2
collage
10.50h x 8w in • 26.67h x 20.32w cm
1
0.00
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0
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Dina Gadia
Everything in Modernation II
2012
2586
2
collage
6.50h x 10.50w in • 16.51h x 26.67w cm
1
0.00
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0
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Dina Gadia
Fangs Into You
2012
2587
2
collage
8.25h x 9w in • 20.96h x 22.86w cm
1
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Dina Gadia
Gargantuas Stay on Dry Land
2012
2588
2
collage
4.50h x 7.25w in • 11.43h x 18.41w cm
1
0.00
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Dina Gadia
Hopelessly Devoted
2012
2589
2
collage
10.75h x 8w in • 27.31h x 20.32w cm
-1
0.00
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0
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Dina Gadia
Ironoclast (Steeped in the Myth and Lore of the Creature)
2012
2590
2
collage
8.25h x 10w in • 20.96h x 25.40w cm
1
0.00
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Dina Gadia
Let the Love Flow
2012
2591
2
collage
8.75h x 9w in • 22.23h x 22.86w cm
1
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Dina Gadia
Life on the Fast Lane
2012
2592
2
collage
15h x 16w in • 38.10h x 40.64w cm
-1
0.00
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0
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Dina Gadia
New Nothing
2012
2593
2
collage
5.75h x 8.25w in • 14.61h x 20.96w cm
0
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Dina Gadia
Scantily Clad Maledom Shenanigans
2012
2594
2
collage
10.50h x 9w in • 26.67h x 22.86w cm
1
0.00
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Dina Gadia
The Hair! The Hairrr! I
2012
2595
2
collage
10.50h x 8w in * 26.67h x 20.32w cm
1
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Dina Gadia
The Hair! The Hairrr! II
2012
2596
2
collage
7.50h x 9w in • 19.05h x 22.86w cm
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Dina Gadia
The Spoiler
2012
2597
2
collage
11.75h x 8.75w in • 29.85h x 22.23w cm
1
0.00
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0
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Dina Gadia
We All End with Lines of Aging Cliché I
2012
2598
2
plywood, house paint, and steel
variable dimension
-1
0.00
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0
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Dina Gadia
We All End with Lines of Aging Cliché II
2012
2599
2
acrylic on canvas
72h x 72w in • 182.88h x 182.88w cm
1
0.00
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Dina Gadia
Hard Ride, No Vision and Raw Flesh
2012
2600
2
acrylic on canvas
48h x 48w in • 121.92h x 121.92w cm
-1
0.00
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Dina Gadia
It’s Easier to Paint the Tree than to Match its Color
2012
2601
2
acrylic on canvas
48h x 48w in • 121.92h x 121.92w cm
1
0.00
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Dina Gadia
Buxxxom Grind (Animal)
2012
2602
2
collage
9.50h x 7.25w in • 24.13h x 18.42w cm
1
0.00
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Dina Gadia
Buxxxom Grind (Black Vision)
2012
2603
2
collage
9.50h x 6.50w in • 24.13h x 16.51w cm
1
0.00
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Dina Gadia
Buxxxom Grind (Companion)
2012
2604
2
collage
10.25h x 7.50w in • 26.04h x 19.05w cm
1
0.00
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Dina Gadia
Buxxxom Grind (Don’t Go Near the Water)
2012
2605
2
collage
10.25h x 6.25w in • 26.04h x 15.88w cm
-1
0.00
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0
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Dina Gadia
Buxxxom Grind (Ghost Town)
2012
2606
2
collage
9.50h x 7.25w in • 24.13h x 18.42w cm
1
0.00
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0
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Dina Gadia
Buxxxom Grind (Monster)
2012
2607
2
collage
9.50h x 7w in • 24.13h x 17.78w cm
-1
0.00
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0
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Artist Page

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