THROUGH-WAY, 2008
Collection of the AteneoArtGallery
Through-way (2008) was exhibited at the Ateneo Art Gallery in “Beyond Frame: Philippine Photomeda”, an exhibition curated by Gina Fairley for the 2009 Zero In program. It is a site-specific installation that consists of four panels of digital images printed in archival inks and 10 timber totems wedged ceiling to floor of the Ateneo Art Gallery. The timber constructions were made from local woods sourced by the artist and constructed in his Manila studio in 2009. In 2011 the installation was accepted into the permanent collection of the Ateneo Art Gallery.
Tony Twigg was the first non-Filipino artist to be collected by the Ateneo Art Gallery under the directorship of Emmanuel Torres. Tony Twigg has had a prolonged and inquisitive engagement with the Philippine art scene, one that started in 1993 and has seen him returning on an annual basis over that 16-year period. His work has entered the consciousness of a generation of emerging artists working in Manila. Through-way essentially is a synthesis of that engagement. It draws from Twigg’s photographs of the Philippines collected over these many years as he has traveled from province to province, and the timber constructions complete that connection between looking and making. They are the refinement of a form that has been drawn from the Philippine’s visual landscape, an echo of bamboo fences, barong-barong architecture and the dense stacking of space from Manila’s market crates to Makati’s skyline. Through-way extends that conversation with other artists in the Ateneo Art Gallery Collection.
