OUT OF ORDINARY SPECTACLES

Film Showing: A World on Display

Out of Ordinary Spectacles by Eric Zamuco is a series of black and white photographs, which reflect his search of what it means to belong. Zamuco, UP Fine Arts graduate and recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artists Award (2003) and Ateneo Art Awards (2005) has been working with photography for the last twenty years. This show puts six years of his life into a different perspective. With Out of Ordinary Spectacles, Zamuco makes sense of his own “displaced experience as part of the Filipino Diaspora.”

Having lived in the United States since 2005, Zamuco has known and felt the Filipino-American community’s sense displacement and detachment. The relationship between cultures may be familiar, but it too can be odd.

Zamuco reflects on this mismatch by creating his own mismatched images. In his photographs, he captures the unfamiliar places he found himself in the US, such as a granary mill or a giant parking lot with SUV limousines, and puts these everyday American settings with something in the foreground that doesn’t fit. Ordinary things are deliberately out of place.

As a related gallery event, Eric Zamuco will have a film screening of A World on Display on February 5,Saturday, 3-5pm in Silverlens Gallery.

The film is a documentary of the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, where two thousand indigenous peoples from all over the world were put on display. Displaced in a foreign land, the indigenous peoples were made to “recreate” their lives. Misunderstood and treated as specimens, many of them suffered. The film, like Zamuco’s show, explores themes of displacement, ignorance, curiosity, power, and invented truths. The “world on display” was not as the world truly was.

Out of Ordinary Spectacles by Eric Zamuco runs simultaneously with Flux by Jon Pettyjohn in SLab; and Cut Felt by Ryan Villamael at 20SQUARE from January 19 to February 12,2011.

For inquiries, contact Silverlens Gallery at 2/F YMC Bldg. II, 2320 Pasong Tamo Ext., Makati, 816- 0044, 0917-5874011, or manage@silverlensphoto.com. Gallery hours are Monday to Friday 10am– 7pm and Saturdays 1–6pm. www.silverlensphoto.com / slab.silverlensphoto.com.