In Adaptable to New Redundancies, Dina Gadia considers her practice of appropriation and her use and reuse of existing images. Engulfed in pictures and representations of her own making, the artist makes a more conscious effort to articulate her instinctual practice of assembling and stylizing from old magazines, posters, comics, encyclopedias, and her body of already existing work.

The show centers around a cut-out floor piece which takes from old hand-painted advertising standees. Cut to the shape of the image, a pair of hands is raised up from a black puddle in a motion for help, the gesture a deference to movie cliché. Entitled New Nadir: Ventures on Unchallenged Imagination, the semi-sculpture collages to the space of its exhibition. Though cut-out standees are not new for Gadia, 3D is still relatively rare in her oeuvre, reflecting possibilities of further investigations, as she continues to recycle pictures from dated mass visual culture.

Grasping with repetition with images hoarded in hard copy and digitized form, this struggle is evident in Bad Innovation: Pointless Riffing on the Same Theme. With hands gesturing towards VISION, the word glares amidst a nostalgic mundane picnic, the obvious but perhaps incoherent elephant in its room. Bad Innovation confronts the relevance of direction, or rather, new directions in one’s practice. Gadia herself, while continuing her usual methods, draws from her previous work to explore its different enunciations. In An In-depth Study, Gadia paints from her own book ink illustration, which in turn was partly derived from a poster image.

Gadia, in this exhibition, works, as is standard for her, on crafting and destabilizing images. She produces through the paradox and limitations of making current, making new, a constant appropriation and seeming redundancy attached to the nature of her practice.

Words by Lisa Chikiamco

Dina Gadia was born in Pangasinan, Philippines in 1986 and currently lives and works in Manila. She combines and re-appropriates images that are old and new, familiar and unfamiliar, beautiful and grotesque. Solo exhibitions include Primal Salvo in Vibracolor at Silverlens (2012); Regal Discomforts at Blanc Compound (2011); Contra- Affair at Silverlens (2010), How Does that Grab You Darling at Blanc Artspace (2010) and Ultra Plastic Style Now! at Hiraya Gallery (2009). Her show Regal Discomforts was short-listed in the 2012 Ateneo Art Awards. She received her BFA Advertising degree in 2006.