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Apaga La Luz - Homage to Juan
With these new works, I pay homage to an ancestor: Juan Arellano, Lolo Juan, younger brother of Papa‘s papa, Arcadio.. This was a clan-destined clandestine exercise, like sitting at the foot of the master and learning the ropes, but with him no longer there- only his nudes in watercolour and in oil...
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Bosch and the Hollow Men
This work, the 3rd in my series of 'inscapes', is strongly political in nature. It was conceived and developed before, during, and after the Philippine elections and subsequent revolution in early 1986. Recycling the Philippine oligarchy through the form of revolution is parodied by the antics of the creatures in a horror-show remake of Hieronymus Bosch's 'Garden of Delights'...
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Dead Trees (Duhat)
While my sculpture has been known mostly as white, life-sized, live cast figures in plaster or cold-cast marble set in their own environment, I have been exploring other materials, one of which is DEAD TREES. For years now, I have been collecting urban debris - tree trunks, root stumps cut and uprooted at construction sites. Each piece I pick up fills me with dread at how recklessly we continue to disregard our trees and our environment. ...
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Eshu
This floor piece was created for the Sixth Biennial of Havana and was exhibited there, together with Tres Buddha Madres in 1997... Eshu is the 'Lord of the Crossroads', the mediator between men and the gods...
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Myths of Creation and Destruction 1
Creation and Destruction. Life-Death-New Life. Cycles and polarities. Can we have yin without yang?...
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Myths Of Creation And Destruction Part II: The Temple Of The Sun God
I am engaged in a search. You might almost call it a need. I am seeking answers to certain metaphysical questions, which present themselves in the form of paradoxes, and concern the problem of 'existence' or the juxtaposition of, but essential interdependence between, Creation and Destruction...
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Temple To The Moon Goddess
My work portrays my philosophy of life. This emphasizes exploration built around a series of ingredients which I feel would be part of a complete philosophy if such an absolute existed. Apart from the present emphasis on Isis, there is Zen, Tao, and especially Tantra in my "Temple to the Moon Goddess." ...
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The Goddess Revisited
"The Goddess Revisited" is part of my continuing search for the Sacred Feminine, this time using archeomythology research that led us to the Mediterranean isle of Malta, where the walls and apses of megalithic temples still stand from Neolithic times, the oldest freestanding structures in existence on our planet, older than the Pyramids or Stonehenge. They were temples for healing in the time of the Goddess. ...
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Three Buddha Mothers (Tatlong Buddhang Ina)
These are not so much goddesses as buddhas - the Buddha never claimed to be God. By casting real mothers, my aim is to bring the divine dimension back into the familiar human figure - to stress the need to search for the sacred in everyday life ...
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Yabyum/Yantra: Tantric Lotuses
My present work is a result of my continuing search for the sacred; of looking around and formulating my own kind of spirituality. The central theme is the Yabyum. I first celebrated this image in 1983, alongside my Temple to the Moon Goddess. In the sanctum sanctorum of that temple was another variation in recumbent position ...
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Naked Inscapes
The basic and constant theme of Agnes Arellano's major works is her desire to explain her personal answer to the paradox of the apparent conflict, but absolute interdependence of, Creation and Destruction or life and death, sun and moon, yin and yang, and so forth ...
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Roaring Tigers, Desperate Dragons in Transition
Agnes Arellano's life-size body casts have decidedly ambiguous connotations. Her strange and compelling trinity of Dea, Lola & Vesta (1995) represents the nude women as mothers, Marys, and mythological creatures, and reflects the artist's desire to explain the apparent conflict between ideologies and beliefs ...
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Agnes Arellano: Flying Dakini
Agnes Arellano’s latest solo exhibition at MO_, Flying Dakini, is a return to the artist’s inscape. Drawing from various philosophies, religion, mysticism and eroticism, she creates a convergence of various elements in an environment that is at one with itself ...
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On Music & the Moon
There was something, we both knew, that the artist Agnes Arellano has to say about our life, about being human beings. This she communicated to him and me together. My son revelled in a playfulness of symbols. In turn, I felt that Agnes had turned Galleries One and Two into a sacred space for God the Mother, older by far than God the Father, she who is calling the artists and prophets of our age back, far back to truths preceding Western civilization ...
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