Pete Jimenez always finds the little gems hidden in junk shops. What most of us see as useless become treasures in waiting. They just need to be in the good hands of Jimenez. In Nail Spa, Jimenez shows us that large nails can have second lives as art pieces. The exhibit runs at West Gallery in SM Megamall from September 4 to 16.
The large nails are not new to Jimenez. He has been using them for some time, mostly as accessories and not as the main focus in a piece. It is just now that he found the right moment to put them all together in one show. “At first glance, they are not absolute ideas or concepts as to how these nails would morph into something worth looking at, but just the same, they ended up on my pile of junk collections, ready to be welded at any point in time.”
On exhibit are about 20 pieces of varying sizes, from a five-inch diameter, ball-shaped piece, “Small World,” made up of nails welded together to make it look like a globe, to a five-feet-high stainless steel work, “Pangkat Kawayan”. Jimenez continues to love the challenge of creating new objects with steel junk, which keeps him busy every weekend. He also relishes how he has been able to show another dimension of his creative side beyond his day job in graphic design and advertising.
And his enthusiasm rubs off when you listen to him talk about his works. “Cathedral Windows” is one of the most unique pieces in the series because “I only used the body of the nails and not the head, which is very evident in the rest of the pieces. I would say it is a very powerful piece, though small in size.”
Another piece that catches Jimenez’s eye is “Google Earth.” He describes it as a see-through earth with arms while also looking like a lunar module or spaceship. Meanwhile, “Say Aaahhh,” which doubles as a vase, looks like it has a mouth as wide open as a whale’s. The robot-looking “After Shave” is made from an automobile spring and a cut-up LPG cylinder with welded nails on top of the cylinder. “Mango Shake” is a moving, swinging piece made of round bars that were bent and twisted to resemble the shape of two interlocking linear sketches of a mango fruit. It was titled such because the object shakes when you tap it.
Such ideas just come from everyday encounters, notes Jimenez, his mind capturing them like snapshots. And once he is in his studio with all the steel junk at his imaginative disposal, get ready to be amazed.
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