"Ani: Rice Elements", a collaborative art exhibition by artists Noell EL Farol, Ruel Caasi, and Mervy Pueblo, was recently exhibited at the White Main Gallery of Kulay Diwa Galleries.
Ruel Caasi's "Pop Rice", an installation of wall-bound pieces, focuses on material documentation of rice sacks labeled with faded text that identifies the variety of socially acceptable quality. After all, rice grain quality represents hard currency. A bountiful harvest is a mark of prosperity, therefore a stuff of celebration. Rice is a staff of life and the struggle to procure to support a family these days demands days of long hard work.
The packaging element symbolically appraise trading of rice as commodity, indicating meaningful association to the supplier, origin and the tasteful asymmetry of man in a society both as producer and consumer; printed graphic elements seem to resemble elements of pop art culture dramatizing consumer image as the bearer of desires.
Consumption of specific rice quality functions as barometer for recording changes in complex economic climate. It also states that products or commodity travel much more quickly than symbolic meanings attached to the objects as we are witnessing today in the massive flow of utility goods.
Kulay Diwa Art Galleries is located at #25 Lopez Ave., Lopez Village, Sucat, Paranaque, Philippines. Regular gallery hours are from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM. For more information, please contact numbers (632)826-0574, or email kulaydiwa@yahoo.com.
