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MANILA – October 21, 2013 – Countless candy-colored eyes watch, while medicine-pink latex installations stretch across above an intricate mangrove root cave. On the wall are self-portraits of the artist as avatar, and as messiah.
In his latest solo exhibit, sculptor and designer Leeroy New takes his audience through the ‘Gates of Hell’, where his iconic cast of aliens and monsters inhabit a spectacular scene guarded by grisly creatures. On one side, a spiky Psychopomp: Chimera, and on the other, the many-eyed Psychopomp: Millipede, both of fiberglass, epoxy and resin.
"Purely aesthetic, and void of the usual fear and anxiety that is invoked by these creatures, he focuses on the arbitrary manipulation of existing clichés, the angle of it being a spectacle, and an ingenious use of material," read the exhibit notes.
New explained, "I love references to cosmological landscapes whether its the divine, the afterlife or even hell. I have no emotional attachment or issues towards it. I purely look at it from a very visual aesthetic, in a very detached way."
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Wearing the Carapace suit, Eisa Jocson performs at the ‘Gates of Hell’ exhibit opening
The artist shared that he loves to design spaces, and wanted to create ‘Gates of Hell’ as a landscape for people to explore. "People can actually interact, move around and actually get a sense of scale and the performers help with that. They help activate the inanimate objects," said New during the exhibit opening on October 19, as members of Sipat Lawin Ensemble performed.
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"Of course, we had to have inhabitants who could be like the divine beings of this landscape and who are basically just entities who reside in this world," New said, recounting that the performers reenacted some of his photographic works, in which he was encased in expanding foam. New shared that he always experiments with the material by trying things on himself first, and that the performers were very willing to go through the process.
"They do very edgy stuff… They’re movers and I trust them to do what they want to react to the setting. We poured the expanding foam over them, they broke free from it, they performed with the latex, with the materials, with the existing structures," he said.
In ‘Gates of Hell’, New worked with several different materials to come up with the various figurative and functional sculptures, some of which are covered with more hand-painted eyes than even the artist himself could count.
"Eyes are very intrinsic to us, we relate to it, it also has divine significances – the all-seeing eye, the evil eye and all of that. of course some of these eyes have transformed into mushrooms. So there’s this whole idea of entropy and cyclical processes of the natural universe, which is part of the landscape," New said.
‘Gates of Hell’ runs from October 19 to November 9, 2013 at Manila Contemporary, Whitespace, 2314 Don Chino Roces Ave. Extension (formerly Pasong Tamo Extension), Brgy. Magallanes, Makati City
