Kaye O'Yek - Take Us We're Free Exhibit @ CCP

Take Us We're Free is an extension of KAYE O'YEK's performance held at the University of the Philippines Manila. In the performance, the artist created an installation of paper dolls in the Bulwagang Rizal area with the word FREE written on the colorful die-cut cardboard surfaces. She also distributed the objects to the audience, engaging them to examine for themselves the layered concepts involved in tearing the individual paper dolls from the rectangular cardboard forms, in effect setting them free from their die-cut existence, while playing on the words FREE as definition of an economic commodity and FREE as appeal / avowal of freedom from machinated construction. As such the paper dolls, which are commonly used as toys by lower-income Filipino children, are transformed into objects of interrogation through the combination of text and image, as well as a commentary on the proliferation of cheap, mass-produced, unlicensed products that utilize modified images of foreign dolls and characters as icons and items for consumption by young citizens of a third world country. O'Yek, an offspring of Filipino-Chinese merchant parents, has been familiar with this object, not only as a toy she played with and made in her youth, but as an item she herself sold in their sari-sari (small-scale general merchandise) store.

Take Us We're Free is a project for TAMA'07 by Kaye O'Yek presently on display at the Atrium, 4/F Cultural Center of the Philippines and will run until May 20, 2007.