Melted City 5
From the very first Melted City in 2012, its current re-staging has evolved into an immense assembly of over 300 artworks hailing from two cities and even beyond—Manila and New York. Beginning with two pioneering artists and longtime collaborators, Louie Cordero and Jordin Isip, who first recognized the parallel trajectories of raw, boundary-pushing artworks reflecting the two cities’ complex histories and shared atrocities, Melted has become an anticipated event, offering a survey of where contemporary art stands across these two regions.
From the original works on paper to the now-predetermined 7 x 7’s, the show’s latest iteration is a sprawling grid of networks designed to include as many artists as possible from different places, while allowing artists to explore the impossibilities within the given frame. The fifth version embodies the connections between artists—the linkages, ties, and meshwork formed through interactions and affiliations. In this chapter, both curators expanded their reach to include recommendations and discoveries from other artists, broadening the matrix that defines the sensibilities of both cities.
Melted City 5 is the continuation of a fortuitous meeting between artists and their imaginations. It is an imaginary tradition for an imaginary place. Emitting blended pasts and futures, it is a space formed by merging indexes, figures, characters, and landscapes. It is what others might refer to as a congregation.
To say that this gathering has reached an unprecedented scale may not be far from the truth. Never before have two origins come together to form an assembly of this magnitude, to represent as many individual artists coming from opposite directions. Never before has the muddle and disarray coalesced into something more jumbled. Never before has what was melted become a solid mess of mesmerizing chaos.
/CLJ
Works
Alburoto - Man
Documentation
