Hard Rain, 2025
Recycled steel and various metal components derived from historical ordnance, cleaned and rendered for artistic display.
Total 110 pieces, installation 14m length
@ Drawing room Manila, July 12 - August 9, 2025

Hard Rain is an installation composed of more than a hundred rusted steel scrap components sourced from decommissioned twentieth-century industrial artifacts. These inert reclaimed steel casings were collected over a decade from Nueva Vizcaya and the Ifugao Province in the Philippines. Local villagers unearthed discarded steel fragments and dismantled vessel parts from long-abandoned scrap sites, selling them to antique pickers for modest earnings that often helped meet daily needs.

Through this work, the artist transforms overlooked material remnants into a contemplative sculptural field-a landscape where accumulated histories are reconfigured into gestures of resilience and renewal. Once utilitarian objects are reassembled into a quiet spatial composition, allowing material memory to surface through acts of gathering, transformation, and making.

TALL ORDER, 2025
Wood and steel, 229 x 61 x 61 cm
Here & Now & Now & Then 2025 @RCBC Plaza in Manila

Pete Jimenez transforms canoe-like dugouts of Bulakeño fisherfolk into monumental forms in TALL ORDER. Through these weathered vessels, he reflects on our deep reliance on water-both gift and trial-while evoking struggles of survival, adaptability, and co existence. The work also gestures toward tensions in disputed waters, where human resilience confronts poverty, conflict, and the will to endure.

Jimenez’s boats are not pristine relics but weathered, chipped, and blistered vessels, their surfaces bearing scars of use and decay. He sources them from fishing villages in Bulacan and Pampanga, cutting and recomposing fragments into towering sculptures that hover between memory and myth. In this reconfiguration, each dugout becomes a symbolic locus-anchored in community traditions of riverine life yet reaching into broader narratives of territorial claim, ecological precarity, and the invisible currents that bind people to place. His practice, rooted in repurposed industrial and maritime detritus, underscores how cultural resilience emerges from the margins and margins of circulation.