DEFENSE MECHANISM ] What is the scent of a male chauvinist pig?

Hanging by a thread. One of the projects at the UPFA thesis defense for the 2009 graduating batch.
Photographs by Devi Madrid

According to Goldie Poblador, a strong musky scent, perhaps reminiscent of your no-good uncle's Charlie. And what is the scent of squalor? It smells of a three-day-old man's urine. And the scent of government? It smells of, well, shit.


Perfumed nightmares. Glass-blown bottles and strangely familiar scents from Poblador.

It's hard to imagine a perfumery in the milieu of the UP Fine Arts Department but last Saturday a roomful of different scents--from the fragrance of Baguio to the smell of Requiem--contained in fragile-looking glass-blown bottles were on display at the UPFA for the thesis defense of the 2009 graduating class. Goldie's installation was easily the most popular of the 14 or so students defending their art that day. It was a major production: from the glass cubes that held each bottle, the store-ready boxes next to it containing the name of each scent, and even the instructions on how to smell.




The presence/absence of color. From topmost, a tunnel-like installation of plastic tubes filled with colored liquid; Liv Vinluan's large works.

Elsewhere in the compound, from a student named Kathleen, a tunnel-like installation with hundreds of colored plastic tubes perfect for the kids gallivanting on the lawn, from Corpse Corpuz multi-layered images of historical icons, and then there was Liv Vinluan's large-scale paintings of eerie images (i.e., a girl holding another girl's cut-off head). This early Liv is already scheduled for a show at Finale late this year, and most of her previous paintings are already in the homes of collectors. Are we seeing the faces of tomorrow's AAP prizewinners? Are we smelling the scent of early success? Go ask Goldie Poblador. Maybe she's already bottled that one.