Ranelle Dial's Cube Uncubed at Mag:net Gallery ABS

Ranelle Dial
Cube Uncubed
5 – 31 December 2006
Mag:net Gallery ABS

Ranelle Dial’s exhibit Cube Uncubed at the Mag:net wrestles between conceptualism and geometry. Markedly inspired from Sol Lewitt’s series of works extrapolating variations of the cube, Dial’s exhibit of paintings depicting a wooden puzzle cube in its various configurations is similarly engaged though with underlying psycho-cognitive behavioral studies of individuals. This modus however of inflecting personality through the means illustrated in this exhibit has been explored upon with her earlier series of paintings depicting dolls in various poses.

The paintings for this exhibit, in square format and numbering up to 22 pieces (not counting a larger sized also in square format), are the direct result of Dial’s volunteers attempts to solve the puzzle. Dial says only three were successful, the rest left the puzzle as it is in their desperation. Interestingly, Dial points to how the produced forms act like clues to how these volunteers think, most of whom are artists she’s exhibited with also. A case in point was Alfred Cruz, who usually paints geometric forms left the puzzle as a line of cubes. An accompanying video showing these attempts act like an instruction manual in solving the puzzle. The puzzle cube is but one of the many variations of similarly constructed puzzles based on Piet Hein’s Soma Cube, a puzzle cube made of 9 polycubes. The cube is an innately chosen polyform for these constructions as it is a finite form with infinite possibilities for reconfiguration. Its symmetry draws from the universal balance – thus it is held to be a perfect form, an open and closed form which can verily articulate the very space it occupies.

The very mechanical quality of the process of reproducing them from photographs - – gridded, glazed, layered - belabor however its very execution It is almost a clear cut elucidation of one of LeWitt’s pronouncements : “the serial artist “does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of the premise.” For this exhibit, the premise is finding for the form of cognition or thought.
Cube Uncubed opens on the 5th of December at 6:30 PM. It will be on view until the end of the month.

Mag:net Gallery is at The Loop, ELJ Center, ABS-CBN compound, Mother Ignacia Avenue corner Eugenio Lopez St. QC. For details please call 4100995 (Shey) or email magnetplus@gmail.com