Finding her way: Labanza’s first solo exhibit at Museo Iloilo

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By John Anthony S. Estolloso

Currently sprawled at the middle of Museo Iloilo’s main display hall is a rusty hand tractor, standing alongside its dilapidated engine’s diesel tank. Both objects rest on scattered sheaves of hay – dagámi would be the more idyllic vernacular – evoking a quaint rural feeling contrasting the geometric coldness of the museum’s floor and the colorful displays on its walls.

The assemblage offers a curious juxtaposition to the aesthetic sobriety surrounding it: this is Jirah Labanza’s centerpiece for her new exhibit. Simply entitled ‘Ways’, the collection of oil paintings is inspired from life at farm and field, recalling in both sense the idea of direction and the search for purpose. As exhibit notes writer Jemima Aranas subtly points out, the art resonates with spiritual inspiration, shown through metaphors and images associated with a life spent in tilling the soil – and the soul, for that matter.

Labanza has displayed her art in many an exhibit before. But this would be the first time that she presents to her audience a composite of her aesthetic inspirations.

There are common threads which readily surface. For one, there are the rustic vignettes of the life agricultural – the tangled grass and shrubbery of fallow fields, the sapling branches and herbage of untamed land, the eponymous rough trails through jungle-growth, the footprints left on clay, the conclave of tulábong (local egrets) standing guard on the mud-fields. Elevated as symbolic configurations, they reveal much of what is personal to the artist: memory is reinterpreted on the canvas as aspiration – to go forward by looking back.

Of course, Labanza’s expressionist technique is very much visible in the works, something which one would readily recognize from her art in previous exhibits. The lashes of ochre, yellow, brown, and white running across and punctuating the canvases achieve the general effect of distortion while accenting and emphasizing her subjects. Taken in a metaphorical sense, it may be read as a visual echo for the artist’s search for new pathways and trails albeit the unsurety and the confusion.

Nowhere are theme and technique made more visible than in Way Maker, the immense oil painting taking the spotlight of the exhibit. Complementing the assemblage of antiquated machine and dried grass at the display hall, the work is a vast composition of verdant hues framed by whitened trunks of young saplings at the heat of summer. At a glance, the implied dryness of the arboreal cover is refreshed by the greenness of the overgrown taláhib, even as a muddy pathway cuts through the undergrowth. Through the scene, Labanza makes the reminiscences of her inspirations present even while concurrently implying a way forward through the brush and bramble.

Taking the works collectively, we are invited to reflect: Are these scenes and images deliberate recollections of a childhood journey that bore fruit to an artistic flowering or should we read them as subconscious ruralistic nostalgia interspersed between the crisscrossing lines of color? Is Labanza’s art representative of persistent aspirations of looking for newer and bolder avenues where the artist may break out from the moulds of her past? For whatever understandings we can glean from her canvases, Labanza is unabashedly beating a path through the vibrant local art scene and finding her niche among her peers. With thus, we look forward to her next outputs.

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Jirah Labanza’s Ways will be on display at the museum until September 1.

(The writer is a language and literature teacher in one of the private schools in the city.)