Zero In 5: Convergence / Zero-in: A Convergence of Five at Five

Zero In 5: Convergence
Zero-in: A convergence of five at five

Zero-in, the consortium of the country’s premier private museums celebrates a milestone anniversary in 2006 as it enters its fifth year with Zero-in 5: Convergence.

Since it was established in 2001, Zero-in has focused attention on the strengths of the member museum’s professional expertise, collections, and programming, proposing dynamic alternatives for institutional support and cooperation. From the original group with consisted of the Ateneo Art Gallery, Ayala Museum and the Lopez Memorial Museum, museums which were bound by similar geneses as personal collections, and whose holdings serendipitously presented a Philippine art historical continuum, Zero-in later welcomed the children’s museum, Museo Pambata, into the fold to underscore the importance of shaping young minds and developing new audiences. This year, the Chinese-Filipino lifestyle museum Bahay Tsinoy rounds out the group as the consortium reflects on its past achievements, discerns its future direction, and unfurls a rich and colorful tapestry that seeks to refigure Philippine realities by focusing attention on a community that has made an indelible mark on the nation’s artistic and cultural fabric.

The theme, “convergence,” therefore aptly describes Zero-in coming to terms with what it has begun, reconsolidating its position, and offering itself once again with even greater resolve as a template for the myriad possibilities offered by encounters held within the ambit of mutual respect.

It is in this light that the encounter between art and science takes center stage with the exhibitions of the member museums being centered around the relationship between two divergent – albeit intersecting - bodies of knowledge: the result of their meetings marked by the discipline of clear-cult parameters mitigated by the open-endedness of the generative imagination.

Bahay Tsinoy opens Zero-in 5: Convergence on 7 October 2006 with Herbs, Harmony and Health, which brings together the science and history behind traditional Chinese medicine. Over 2,000 years old, traditional Chinese medicine is an ancient form of healing guided by the principle of internal balance and harmony. In essence, it is widely known for acupuncture and herbology, a technique as well as medium to improve our capacity to balance the “resources” in our body. Traditional Chinese medicine is also a system of medicine which uses natural laws and energetic principles in regulating the free-flow of vital energy for health and well-being.

This exhibition will show that Western and Chinese medicine are not substitutes for each other, neither are they competitors. Rather, it will reveal how medical practitioners see them as complementary forms of medicine.

On the occasion of the tercentenary of the Jesuit Bro. Josef Kamel, SJ, the Ateneo Art Gallery presents Flora: Beauty, Desire and Death on 11 October 2006, celebrating the work of botanical artists who have documented Philippine plants and contemporary Filipino visual artists who have derived inspiration from plants and read them as a metaphor of the human condition. Bro. Kamel, who arrived in the Philippines in 1697, placed the Philippines in the world map of science through his vigorous study of local flora that led to drawings of about 270 plant specimens.

Fuzzy Logic which opens on 25 October 2006 at the Lopez Memorial Museum attempts to craft a tentative survey of how Filipino visual art and popular culture have, over time, weighed in on questions of craft, mechanization, industrialization and development, and living in the age of interactive TV, surveillance cameras and Pinoy Big Brother. A cursory scan through relevant reads reveals that these engagements span ironic extremes – from ultra-nativism/self-exoticization to hybridization and blind appropriation and yet, Fuzzy Logic plays on the volatility that rings with shifting territories, ever-changing avatars, elastic virtual communities, and multiple versions of the real.

Museo Pambata features an interactive exhibition beginning on 11 November 2006 that showcases the medicinal properties of plants in The Healing Garden. Like a small oasis, a pocket garden of actual medicinal plants can be explored by visitors of all ages and they will experience the textures, colors, fragrances and even prepare and taste a sample of a healing elixir. Pressed flower artist Penny Reyes-Velasco presents 20 medicinal plants selected from her flower journal collection of Zambales flora from the Pinatubo mountain range. (1995-1996 expeditions). Each artwork was picked, dried, and carefully mounted by hand.

Closing the Zero-in 5 exhibition series on 15 November 2006, the Ayala Museum presents Black Bouquet, an exhibition that focuses on an intensely creative period in the early years of Juvenal Sanso’s artistic career, when the Paris-based artist produced an abundance of etchings and lithographs from 1955-1968, at the outbreak of student demonstrations, bringing together over 60 pieces from the collections of the artist and Zero-in partners Ateneo Art Gallery and the Lopez Memorial Museum. The works showcase Sanso’s “fine hand for linear detail” yielding gnarled trees, lush vegetation, and desolate landscapes – now recognized images in Philippine modern printmaking.

A full-color catalogue and an educational workbook will be available. For more information, please contact Rosan Cruz at 449-2856 or 0917-897-8940 or email rcruz@benpres.com.ph

For more information on Zero-In, please go to www.zeroin2006.com.

Exhibition dates:

Bahay Tsinoy, “Herbs, Harmony, and Health,” 7 October 2006 – 31 January 2007

Ateneo Art Gallery, “Flora: Beauty, Desire and Death,” 14 October 2006 – 31 March 2007

Lopez Memorial Museum, “Fuzzy Logic,” 25 October 2006 – 5 April 2007

Museo Pambata, “The Healing Garden,” 11 November 2006 – 31 January 2007

Ayala Museum, “Black Bouquet,” 15 November 2006 – 1 March 2007