Kara de Dios mounts ‘In The Pink’ at Galerie Stephanie
MANILA, Philippines - The popular attribution of the color pink is to notions of femininity. In hospital maternity wards for instance, it is common for baby girls to be swaddled in pink. References to this color can thus become a vantage point to examine issues of femininity, feminism, and the female form.
It is fitting then that female artist Kara de Dios’ first solo exhibit is called “In the Pink” at Galerie Stephanie. “In the Pink” features new illustrations and paintings of Kara de Dios that play with images of health and femininity, depicted through the self-portraiture, which repeatedly figures into de Dios’s portfolio. De Dios’s art often deals with her relationship with the female body, working with various media to produce images and objects that are both whimsical and unsettling.
A visual artist and web designer, Kara de Dios graduated from the UP College of Fine Arts in 2008 with a degree in Visual Communication, and was awarded Juror’s Choice for Best Thesis–Publications Cluster. She has participated in a number of group exhibitions, the most recent being Art Fair Tokyo in 2015.
“I do speak a lot about women/myself and our relationships with our bodies,” says De Dios. “In the pink of health” rises to the top of a more poetic mind, yet there’s that undeniable whiff of irreverence, followed by a wink and a nudge, that cannot be ignored in the strange, soupy world. This is, after all, the world of Kara’s boob-heads.
At first glance these are images of, in her words, “nubile-bodied girls,” yet the second and third looks they merit bring out the bizarre, the “pretty-but-weird” element that she has gotten used to hearing about when it comes to descriptions of her work. Yet, they are also comforting in their familiarity.
“I always felt that anything objectively and typically beautiful was boring,” she says of these sweet yet strange characters. Here, what appear to be mountains are actually “some dead giantess’ breasts” and strawberry vines sprout from butts. The softness of pink is given a razor-sharp edge by the fact of it also being the color of raw flesh and open wounds.
De Dios aims for work that is honest, that recognizes the body as more than a vessel for the brain. She writes, “In any piece of art that I look at, I try to look for honesty and humanity. I usually find it in how the artist touched and worked with their medium. I love seeing how the brush hairs lay and moved across the paper, a misplaced line that looks perfect where it is, or an errant colour that just works somehow.”
“In the Pink” opens tomorrow at Galerie Stephanie, Unit 1B Parc Plaza Bldg., 183 Eulogio Rodriguez Jr. Ave, Diliman, Quezon City. For inquiries, call Adrian Gabriel at 709-1488.
