The Dyslexia Adventures: Bravo Emong Borlongan and Plet Bolipata!!

Plet's Le Boudoir Rouge Love Seat and Emong's Escape Artist

When the Earth Smelled of Water is husband and wife team Emong Borlongan and Plet Bolipata's latest show at the Alliance Francaise de Manille. The two have been married for the last twenty years and hied off in Zambales where they actually met.

Most of Emong's artworks depict life in the fishing village of San Antonio while Plet's works are totally new. Well, I haven't seen these seats before. They are functional sculpture sofa pieces made out of resin, crochet, steel and even broken glass.

Note that she used the same mold for her ongoing show at Bonifacio Global City's offsite gallery called imagiNATION. It is an outdoor installation featuring 7 to 12-foot animal sculptures.

Emong's Dynamite Kid

Here's what Rene Guatio wrote about the couple's latest project:

Based in San Antonio, Zambales, in a seaside mango orchard and art center, the artist couple Elmer Borlongan and Plet Bolipata bring their visions of creation, their celebrations of life to the city: colorful canvases imbued with the refreshing and life-giving blessings of the sea and water, resin vessels that allude to the ark, and the great deluge that drowned the earth, so that life may be renewed.

Emong's Melancholia

Emong highlights various scenes - a 'chicken fight' in the water, a child drawing water from a well, fishermen with their nets, an escape artist in a water container, a woman wading into the ocean, a scene of melancholy in a bath tub - each an allusion to water and the sea, reflecting the artist's signature humor, wit, and deep understanding of the human character. He says: "We are drawn to water because we live close to the sea."

Plet's Le Taxi Sofa

Plet always injects a fresh and playful sensibility to her art, which includes oils, collages, naif figures, and lately, colorful mosaics of animals. Her metal and tile mosaics of zoo animals about to be installed at Global City are complemented by the resin sofas in this show that were inspired by Holly Golightly's bathtub sofa from Breakfast at Tiffany's.

The sofas represent vessels that save us from the deluge, their colors reminding us of the rainbow that symbolizes God's promise, and our hope. She hopes that people "can relax as the stresses and strains of their daily lives subside, and take the time to enjoy and appreciate the preciousness of life."

Bravo Plet and Emong! The show will run until May 3, 2012.