- "Pio Abad":http://www.axisweb.org/seCVFU.aspx?ARTISTID=12791
I see my practice as an exploration of the dualities that operate within the discourse of excess: the relationship between control and collapse, and the precarious line between the ornamental and the excremental. I am drawn to how these dualities are made manifest in history, from the calculated hegemony of totalitarian aesthetics and the shambled marriage of 70’s modernism and the rococo in Imelda Marcos’s disco-infused regime, to the increasingly dire present brought on by our schizophrenic relationship with luxury. An anxiety towards these persistent failures of history informs my work – a nagging feeling that we are tragically bound to these patterns, fated to exist in a perpetual state of farce.The central premise of my work is the creation of failed spectacle, constructing intensely layered systems of images and materials that duly collapse under their own weight. A lavish orchestration of entropy that consumes grand narratives and Utopian visions into an entanglement of grotesque, often desperately comical, gestures. The emphasis on labour intensive handmade processes and references to the abject body are attempts to render us complicit to this cyclical collapse – measuring the extent of human folly with the peaks of our pompadours and the intricacies of our gilded cages.