h o u n d s i n h e a v e n: Irma Lacorte at Galleria Duemila!

"Transit Story"
IRMA LACORTE
Galleria Duemila

Lacorte's symbolic and expressionist works are ruminations on the cyclical and transitional: various stages of beings and objects, their contexts within cultures and economies. A continuing series of paintings, the works are images of various transitory states, spanning the stages of creation to consumption, distribution and destruction.

Merging symbolic figuration and abstraction in her free-flowing diagrams and scapes, Lacorte's works tackle the slippery nature of transits: from “raw materials to packaged materials”, from “waste material into art materials”; the transit of “actual objects back and forth across the Third World and the First Worlds, the northern and southern hemispheres”; the transit of “material value in the context of the commercial market and the art market”, as the artist herself writes. Given the array of commercialized and stereotypical images in today's visual culture, Lacorte chooses to paint not what is readily evident as objects within a consumerist economy; preferring instead to denote these figurative contexts through the symbolic and the abstracted.

Lacorte reflects on the complex relationships between objects created within this world, not only in a philosophical way, but in consideration of the socio-economic, contextual, and personal aspects to images. In the process, she creates a complex array of images and processes: entire scapes and ecosystems denoting the very real complexities in the modern world.

Entering the Philippine visual arts scene in 1998, Irma Lacorte has produced 12 solo exhibitions to date and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in between. Her body of art works tackle the parallel trajectories of gender, identity, and memory.

Lacorte serves as the curator for the Luzon leg of the Sungdu-an 2009 project. She has been the recipient of grants from the Freeman Fellowship, the Asian Cultural Council, and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and an art residency from the Vermont Studio Center in the United States in 2003. Lacorte is a member of several artist groups, including Kasibulan, Grupo Otso, Lesbianarama, Womyn Supporting Womyn Center, and Anting-Anting (Cavite Art Group).

An art educator, Lacorte has taught at the UP Los Banos Department of Humanities and the De La Salle University Department of Behavioral Science in Dasmarinas. She is currently taking up a Master's degree in Fine Arts (majoring in Studio Arts) at the University of the Philippines (UP).

Lacorte also collaborates with other artists on independent film and video art projects, such as the Video Art project in Madrid, Spain (January 2007) and Balikbayan (September 2004) in New York, the latter of which won the Best Short Film award from the Cinemanila International Film Festival in 2004.