UPV prof’s public sculpture to relive ‘missing crowd’

UP Visayas celebrates the National Arts Month with the exhibition of Memorial Park: Missing the Crowd – a public sculpture installation of Martin Genodepa – at the front quadrangle of the Main Building in the Iloilo City campus of the university.

Crowding, with its positive and negative values, has been prohibited in the time of this pandemic and has changed the nature of social interaction among people. Memorial Park: Missing the Crowd is a doodle-like representation of mass gathering, with figures closely huddled or in dynamic interaction.

Memorial Park: Missing the Crowd converses with the UP Oblation nearby. It brings memories of mass gatherings common in the national university when issues of important public or academic interest arise.

The artwork fabricated from steel rods invites viewers to interact with the figures by inserting themselves among the figures to relive the memory and experience of being in a crowd.

The need to create more art for public spaces – or publicly accessible art – has grown because of the pandemic. This is a challenge that Memorial Park: Missing the Crowd addresses.

Martin Genodepa, the artist, teaches at UP Visayas and is a recipient of the UP Artist 1 award for art productivity for 2018-2020. He was a 2009 Fellow of the Ford Foundation and an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center in 1999, having received a full grant from the Freeman Foundation Fellowship for Asian Artists. His works have been favorably received by critics including Patrick Flores, Alice Guillermo, and Tito Valiente.

Memorial Park: Missing the Crowd is Genodepa’s 17^th solo exhibition, and is made possible by a Creative Work Grant from the UPV Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Extension.

The exhibition is from 16 February until 9 April 2020.  Art audiences wishing to view this may pass through the main entrance of the city campus at Delgado Street.

COVID-19 health and safety protocols apply.