Something old, something new: Lilianna Manahan’s ‘ATBP’
There’s something very apt about the title of Lilianna Manahan’s solo show, “ATBP,” the Filipino acronym for “at iba pa,” meaning “et al,” or “and everything else.” That’s kind of the way Manahan’s art has evolved, from Foundation Studies in Art and Design at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design in 2004, through her BFA Industrial Design degree completed at UP Diliman, through her own design practice that incorporates sculpture, ceramics, textiles, applied arts such as metal-crafting and silversmithing—often in the same piece. It’s a material-driven practice that has seen her awarded as one of six Rising Asian Talents at the first Maison et Objets Asia in 2014, and shortlisted as a nominee in the Ateneo Art Awards in 2018.
At Leon Gallery, Makati, a taho vendor offers his wares on the outside steps as you enter, where a spread of pieces sweeps into view: layered paintings, ceramics, dramatically lit sculptures, boxed objects. A table in back holds a selection of her “Mer-chicken” pieces in various sizes, now decorated with symbols, colors, splashes of gilding.
Talking with Manahan, you realize her practice always involves seeing what came before, the directions she’s taken and maybe set aside; then allowing herself to pick them up, incorporating everything into the new, next direction. It’s never quite that methodical, she’ll point out: “I worked with glassblowers in Prague almost 10 years ago, and I had a bunch of leftover retasos (glass fragments), stuff like that, and I just found that it was such a waste to just leave them there.” These now emerge, growing ikebana-like from the other glass and metal structures on display. “I have a lot of things here that just kind of got put on pause or just kind of stayed there for a bit. I guess, after not looking at them for a couple of years, you kind of know what to do to give them a new life.”
In the show, we see fragments combined in new ways with new materials—an intuitive process, but relying on techniques she’s grown more interested in, like kintsugi. Or materials she gravitates towards, like gold. “Gold is like my neutral, it’s part of my natural palette; that’s something that just never left me.”
Materials mastered in her product design studies take on brave new forms in the Leon Gallery space. “It’s a mix of things. Like, I was thinking about kintsugi, how it brings broken things together.” (Her mom, historian Tats Manahan, also employs the technique in her own work.) “And how metal works; it’s so malleable. So it’s really still an exploration of a material in that sense, where I’m just trying to get different facets of something that supposedly I’m familiar with.” The delicate results are belied by behind-the-scenes videos, showing her bending the materials into new shapes with acetylene torches.
For her, the show is “just a mix of all the materials I’ve been working with in the last 15 years. So there’s porcelain, there’s glass, there’s brass, there’s painting.”
While painting on canvas is something she’s been less focused on in the past (even though “both my mom and dad painted in different ways”), for this show, “I decided to do paintings, but attack them in a way that I’m familiar with. So it has gold leaf and it’s not purely paint; it’s still a mix of other materials on canvas.”
Some canvases incorporate touches of gold, almost a bedazzling effect, such as the layered ripped jeans with the offhand description: “Maong na tinastas, marami pang beads, gold and blue.” “I’m not very good at writing titles,” she says with a laugh, “so I just describe the piece.” At the opening, Lilianna also shows off the jeans she is wearing, also reworked by her.
Other Japanese concepts—like ikebana and sogetsu—play into her arrangements of items. And the ceramic mer-chickens, which have become a “mascot” of sorts. “I started doing them straight out of college.” They summon memories of her grandmother, who collected figurines of “fantastical creatures.” For this show, “I tried refining how I approached the chicken: I wanted to show more of the colored porcelain—it’s not glazed. The pigments are actually in the clay.”
As the show title suggests, Manahan is offering a little of everything in her sarisari store.
“I came up with that name because I just really like working with different materials and no matter how many times different people have told me to like try and stick to one, it’s just too hard.” So the at iba pa of it all has its way.
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“ATBP” is at Leon Gallery until June 25.
