Born in 1971 in the Philippines, Annie Cabigting majored in painting at the University in the Philippines and was a recipient of the Ateneo Art Awards, Philippines in 2005. A conceptualist, Cabigting attempts through her paintings to grapple with some of the most fundamental questions in art: representation, originality, appropriation, art and reality, object and image. This work is based on the wall sculpture ‘On the Shelf’ (1971) by British conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin. Craig-Martin’s original sculpture – comprising a tilted row of milk bottles placed on a wooden shelf – has been depicted by Cabigting as a photo-realistic painting which is, in turn, placed on a near-identical wooden shelf held up by metal brackets. By repeating the phrase ‘on the shelf’, the work enacts and makes obvious the ‘objecthood’ of the painting. It is thus repetition and deviation at once, and the result is a sophisticated mind-bending triple ‘mise-en-abyme’ (meaning an image within the image): of image, word/title, and of the artwork itself.
