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Whistler
Suit, windchimes; chair, hand-bells; curtain, earrings
2017

The Arm consists of a bifurcated yet conjoined articulation/presentation of sound, its potential, and the ambiguous parameters demarcating it from the arbitrary categories of noise and music.

In Lesley-Anne Cao’s works, sound-producing objects are woven into various household items jarringly invading its standard designs as they introduce a new set of functions to be activated by viewers. By virtue of combination and extension, these items become atypical machines, fulfilling a desire to witness such instruments manifest.

Itos Ledesma, on the other hand, presents a homemade album that appropriates the lexicon and spectacle oft-associated with mainstream pop music. Played on loop, its intangible presence is imposed on the audience thus gesturing toward the inescapability of pop. This is to be augmented with a lecture-performance that serves to demystify the recorded musician’s invisible hand.

Tactile and disembodied, prosthetic and amputated, potential and kinetic, active and interactive. The Arm presents the varying forms, mechanisms, and operations of sound fully acknowledging the tension and harmony between seemingly polar qualities. (Dominic Zinampan)

Fields #1 & #2



The Arm
Two-man exhibition with Itos Ledesma
98B COLLABoratory, Manila
5 August - 2 September 2017







I was told that very young children are introduced to music by being given hand bells, needing no instruction and relying on the instinct to move an object in hand, producing sound.

In thinking of combinations of objects into other objects, their individual materiality and function are important to me. The finished object will sound when one handles it the way its components are used in their familiar, everyday setting. I want a chair to look and work like a chair; I want earrings to look and hang like earrings. They don’t belong or make sense together but can be reconfigured to be, in combination, something else.

I think of this kind of process as akin to writing poetry in plain language where the use of everyday words, when strung and positioned in certain ways, can be a way to go in to, out of, or around ordinariness. I intervene through attempts at going in to, out of, or around these objects’ ordinariness by opening their "new" properties (such as a specific mode of use, experiencing of sound) to people who will notice (or not notice) them announce their small, newly possible, gestures.


Composite Circuits
Group exhibition curated by Dayang Yraola
Vinyl on Vinyl Gallery, Makati City
7 June - 30 July 2018