Don Salubayba continues his investigation on unfamiliary tableaux for his new series Syncopated Simulacra and Other Hallucinatory Flashbacks in the Annexe Gallery, Kuala Lumpur. While his previous exhibition in Singapore, which was also through a collaboration with Valentine Willie Fine Art, played with familial settings that contain personal narratives but are allegorical in scope, these new works feature proverbial plates from the Western Art tradition and turn-of-the-century photographs. In the frequency of their mention across the history of Art, these images have generated a curve pattern of reception to Salubayba. There is a gap in the intended exactitude of the historical method, and the artist uses this distance to prove the foreignness of these icons. He investigates and portrays this anachronism by evoking the aura of a painted-over ruin which announces both its original presence and the result of a collision of many interpretations of an inherited past. This series reconstructs time-old classics and photographs not as a subversive means of probing into loopholes of art history and imagery. Rather, Salubayba comes to terms with this legacy and depicts this very process.
Syncopated Simulacra and Other Hallucinatory Flashbacks contains the fulcrums of much of what Salubayba's work is about, such as the tenuous nature of reading historical precedents, the vagaries of personal and collective memories and the unmistakeable allure in finding methods of reconciliation with existing institutions of thought.
Don Salubayba recently fulfilled two residencies in the Vermont Studio Center in Vermont, USA and Taipei Artist Village in Taipei, Taiwan respectively. Recent solo exhibitions before Syncopated Simulacra and Other Hallucinatory Flashbacks include Space Between in Red Mill Gallery, Vermont (2011) and Lamat in Tin-Aw Gallery, Manila (2010). In collaboration with his Australian network Salubay has also currently completed a major production with Anino Shadowplay Collective, a multi-media company focusing on the art of light and shadowplay, called “Within and Without” in Blacktown Arts Center, Sydney.
Salubayba earned his Bachelor's degree in Studio Art from the University of the Philippine College of Fine Arts in 2000 and was bestowed the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2009. Other international venues where he exhibited include Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan and D.u.m.b.o Art Center and Goliath Art Space in New York, all of which were culminating events to residency programs he garnered from 2004 to 2008. The summary of his past solo exhibitions comprises of The Peculiarity of a Familial Atmosphere in Valentine Willie Fine Art Singapore (2009), The Unofficial Theory of Power in the Drawing Room in Manila (2009), A Brown Man's Shadow Allegory Project in Tin-Aw Gallery, Manila (2008) and Imaje-Nacion in the Amorsolo Gallery of the Cultural Centers of the Philippines (2006).
