One Year this August

Paniki Gallery
Batan, Aklan
August 2018

OPENING RECEPTION:
SUNDAY AUGUST 12, 2018, ALL DAY

Elmo’s House Artist Residency is an involved project in which my art converges with my personal life. As such, this on-going project takes place in my ancestral home, the former house of my father. It is deeply intimate, and at times, even I get uncomfortable at the increasingly fading line between life and art. 

The working through of these issues come during the process and not before. The mistakes are part of the project. Perhaps the missteps are what makes this work profoundly unfashionable and challenging, but it is now the current that dictates everything. 

This one-day exhibition was held during the one year death anniversary of my father Elmo F. Del Rosario. In keeping with tradition, the anniversary was commemorated with a dedicated mass and lunch for invited family, friends and former colleagues of my fathers’. This exhibition was for the guests to view and appreciate the breadth of his life and the familial history he is a part of. 

There is a distancing that happens within the ‘white walls,’ whether those walls are within the confines of a large institution or a make-shift art space. In displaying and curating photos of my father, my personal loss became easier to face. Already, these traditions surrounding the death of family, such as the one year death anniversary, remove what I understand to be a private process, into the public domain. In creating an exhibition specifically for this event, I regain control of what I keep for myself, versus what I share with others.

Kuh Del Rosario