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The title of the recent survey show of Maria Cruz’s work from the last decade or so—‘oo yes’—sounds like a squeal of delighted joy in English, but ‘oo’ means yes (in all its possible inflections) in the Philippines’ Tagalog. The title, like most of the works selected for the exhibition, points to the processes of cultural translation that are ubiquitous in everyday experiences of the modern world, and that form one of the nuclei of Cruz’s work. Brought about by the forces of globalisation, migration, mediatisation and tourism, these constant translations of the quotidian cross media and cultural forms, vernacular and high culture, commerce and art. Cruz is adept at creating constant rapid oscillations between two sides of the same coin, or two sides of the same story, an undecidable difference and/or sameness that makes for complexity, ambivalence, and the kind of irony created by the invitation to the Sydney version of the show. This bears an image on the verso that seems to contradict the recto—a detail of Cruz’s painting of Yoko Ono’s ‘noooo’: a gothic and cartoonish scream of horror and refusal.
The yes and no, separated and conjoined by the invitation, are both dominated by the ‘O’, one of those innumerable yet constantly counted and accounted round things—letters, coins, bottle tops—which so fascinate Cruz. These round things form circles that open ambiguously onto a void or a vortex, portal to an abyss or to bliss, form signs which might mean nothing, zero, zilch—or might encompass everything. If some of these works remove coins from the exchange value of the market and obliterate the face value of the currency, they nevertheless insert the coins into other systems where... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline