1993 APT1 Conference : Identity, tradition and change

Chit Balmaceda's installation Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head (1992) is a wall-hanging of painted laundry floggers shaped like rain/teardrops. On the floor a corrugated wash basin picturesquely catches the giant drips. The artist argues that this may be dismissed from the patriarchal point of view as insignificant because the housewife's labor is done for free. She says she culls these banal home implements from her daily setting to ventilate woman's repressed oratory of anger and pain over her life-long battle against household dirt that has caused and costed her isolation from public and industrial spheres of life. WOMAN AS HER OWN WOMAN Paz Abad Santos' Thou Shalt Not Judge (1992) is an installation which symbolized the thinking woman. Here she constructed a simple, but visually powerful weighing scale made of wood and bamboo. On one end of the balance was a stark, smooth, round, heavy rock. On the opposite end was a flourish of weeds, seeds, dried leaves, shells and other natural discards gathered in a basket. Thinking Nude another terracota piece by Lluch is the artists' answer to the passive, erotic female nude traditionally made for male admiration. This nude matter-of- factly examines her own body, looks straight to her own eyes in front of the mirror, objectively touches herself as if to declare "Iam notjust a body , I Dulcie Dee's feminism is a celebration of woman's freedom, reign,and delight at her own body. Her vibrant works unfold a flourish of lilies, buds, gametes, and anthers whimsically juxtaposed with woman's hand, breasts, and vulva, unabashedly proclaiming a fulfilled sexuality. At times the blooms and spores in her colorful gardens are mingled with phallic allusions, suggesting female initiative and consummation in the sexual caucus. WOMAN AS CITIZEN OF THE THIRD WORLD Brenda Fajardo orders her life and art within the simplicity of the grid, along which she lays out her mystical cards. She depicts conflicts of gender, class, and nation through a folkish retelling of Philippine history, legend, and occultism. In colorful naive figurations interspersed with medieval heraldry, she relates a people's anti-colonial struggle contextualized in current political problems. Often injecting her visual stories with typical wry folk humor, she draws her women as strong, free, and unemotional, resisting neo-feudal forces that box her into gender sterotypes. Baidy Mendoza's terracotta pieces depict woman in her various roles : as mother, as teacher, as lover, as thinker. She chooses the red, humble earth as medium for a statement declaring a rejection of high technology return and a return 3