Hairy Things : Tin Garcia, Catalina Africa, Jeona Zoleta, Carina Santos

Hairy Things gathers artists who represent current modes of art practice that are not really gender specific in their mastery and focus of their respective forms of expression and subject matter. It only happens that they are females and are doing it in their most idiosyncratic way.

Tin Garcia's painting forefathers maybe traced from the ultra-romanticists of the Pre-Raphaelites who seem to have a tendency to paint nubile teens as fallen heroines from Greek tragedies and Arthurian legends, yet she recasts them or rather re-paints them over as bondage girls very much in control with their BDSM fetishes or mythological creatures with their neurosis revealed while Oh Bondage Up Yours wafts somewhere in your subconscious.

Jeona Zoleta, the most brashly unapologetic of them all, shouts out big pronouncements of her sexuality, desires, and her very own quirkiness via the swag and confidence of her painting skill, a seeming indictment of the macho posturing of heroic expressionist painting by punctuating them even more with garish pink and glitters and unwieldy installations stuck together with unicorn stickers and glow sticks.

Catalina Africa, the seeming wild card, as her conceptually-based works teeter in ambivalence, and dry drollness. She has a schizophrenic art practice that's both cut and dried conceptual and compulsively girly when she teams up with Zoleta with their zany messy collaborations that are revisitations of teen age pajama parties. Pipilloti Rist would be a proud secret member to this exclusive girl art club.

Carina Santos' literary-bound works are neat, and reserved, dainty, and well- crafted. Making collages from remnants of books as though piecing an alternate narrative, at the same time ordering things in their proper places, a compulsion for organization which belies her background as a graphic designer who aims for legibility foremost than meaningless style.

We are given these diverse presentations and formats and concerns by these 4 artists that any discussion about the F thing can now readily be glossed over, but not readily and necessarily so I'm afraid. So yeah, let's bring it on and let it all hang loose, all those F things and all those Hairy things related to that F thing.

The artists will be discussing their works via a Videoke Talkdown and performance at 5PM.

Words by Lena Cobangbang.