1,976 Objects | Noel Ed De Leon

1,976 Objects
Noel Ed De Leon
9 August to 7 September 2019
Opening Reception: 9 August, Friday at 6 pm
1F and 3F Galleries
UP Vargas Museum

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The University of the Philippines Vargas Museum opens 1,976 Objects, a journey through the works of London-based visual and performance artist Noel Ed De Leon on August 9, Friday, 6pm at the 1F and 3F Galleries of the museum.

Exhibiting for the first time in his home country, the activist, migrant, and artist Noel Ed De Leon gathers old and new found object assemblages, installations, readymades, multi-media sculptures, paintings, and photographs in a month-long exhibition at the Vargas Museum. 1,976 Objects embodies the current moment in Noel’s ongoing artistic process as he gathers and reanimates singular, communal, and cultural histories told through material objects. He explores anxieties around memory and maps traces of history in the links between living beings and non-living things, and in the body as it assumes a physical relationship with objects and surroundings over time.

Born in Pangasinan in 1976, Noel moved to Manila and graduated with a degree in architecture before he and his wife Leah migrated to the United Kingdom in 2007. A year later the recession hit, and Noel turned from interior design to art as a means to signify his experiences and passions. It was in 2012 that he met David Medalla, a pioneer in kinetic and performative practice, and was invited to participate in the London Biennale. The gripping and interactive performance, Life As I Know It was the first of many, marking Noel’s steady progression away from figurative painting to his current practice of experimentation with installation, multi-media sculpture, art made with found and collected objects, and performance. Since then, Noel has mounted Tokens of a Time Gone By: Reanimating History as Art in the Work of Noel Ed De Leon, a major solo exhibition at the Philippine Embassy of London (2014), participated in group exhibitions Should the World Break In at the Fundación Joan Miró (2017), and Southeast Asia Performance Collection at the Haus der Kunst, Germany (2019) among others. He is currently co-director of Batubalani Art Projects, a London-based non-profit organization dedicated to promoting Philippine modern and contemporary art.

Noel Ed De Leon’s 1,976 Objects will be on view at the UP Vargas Museum from August 9 to September 7, 2019, Tuesdays to Saturdays, 9am to 5pm. For more information, please contact Vargas Museum at (+632) 981-8500 loc. 4024 (UP trunkline), (+632) 928-1925 (fax) or send an email to vargasmuseum@up.edu.ph. You may also check our website at https://vargasmuseum.wordpress.com, Facebook via https://fb.me/vargasmuseum.upd and Twitter via @UPVargasMuseum for updates.