Pete Jimenez is among the few Filipino sculptors who have consistently explored the qualities of scrap metal as a medium, transforming rusty and discarded shards from junk shops into visual puns and garage-produced gems.

In his free time from work in the advertising and animation industries, Jimenez scouts around the yards of scrap metal suppliers and looks “through and into” pieces that can be reconstituted into straightforwardly witty and playful objects. The artist creates composites from these found metals, preferring to let quirks or unusual shapes to take a life of their own. Finding aesthetic value in things that would be otherwise be written off as worthless, Jimenez’s art strikes an unlikely symphony between medium and meaning, where “one’s trash becomes another’s treasure,” as the artist himself describes it.

In this recent show of new works, Jimenez produces life-size sculptures from discarded automobile body parts, particularly from old Volkswagen (VW) Beetles, Kombis, and sedan notchbacks acquired from suppliers in Pampanga province. Far from being a sullen graveyard of old cars, the show Body Parts becomes a whimsical collection of works who acquire a second life of their own as streetwise survivors with their own personal stories to tell.

Compared to Jimenez’s earlier works which were often produced from smaller junk metal pieces, this new series of sculptures is comparably large, reflecting how the artist is experimenting with much bigger dimensions and a wider selection of materials. Some works—such as those produced from VW fenders, trunks, roofs and kombi front “faces”–span up to six and seven feet high.

As with his earlier sculptures, Jimenez’s themes are drawn from incongruent and seemingly random catch phrases from popular culture and mass media, words and images that he often uses in his line of work. The artist adopts a very personal approach to re-creating each piece, trying to cast them in a different light through emphasizing the role of design.

A lot of thought and work goes into making these objects seem like spontaneous, happy accidents or creative bursts of coincidence—into giving the viewer an impression that these quirky tales have been lying there all along for one to discover. Jimenez selects each piece and painstakingly twists and turns their dimensions into their current state. He draws out the distressed and chipped patinas of the VW metal frames and parts (which date back to the 1960s and 70s) by enhancing the original condition of the parts he salvages, exposing them to the elements and sealing in their flaws with automotive finishes.

Many of the works in this show also optimize the VW Beetle’s distinct parts and visual qualities to come up with new works. For instance, the work Raise the Roof utilizes a 1960′s VW roof, cut out from the rest of the frame, to create a much higher structure while Red Riding Hood is created from the unmistakeable curve of the VW hood and bumper. The VW Beetle’s classic rotund frame, meanwhile, is emphasized in the work Ball Park Figure, where metal parts are further curved and curled up in a tight, imperfect ball. A much smaller work, Science Project, utilizes the car’s “half moon” hub caps.

Over the years, Jimenez’s sustained foray into sculpture from scrap metal has established  that the exquisite can be drawn out from the everyday; that desire can be created from discards. In the end, it is Jimenez’s tireless process of discovery, improvisation and creativity which imbue a special quality to his pieces.

Signifying a transition of sorts in Jimenez’s personal work as an artist, Body Parts amuses and awes through its subjects and stories. This recent show indicates that the artist is more than ready to explore more forms and hopefully even more concerns. How the artifacts of these interesting times can attest to other realities—an entire industry spawned by the importation of scrap metal and automobiles from the First World to the Third World has long been a feature of country’s economic landscape, for instance—are possibly some of the material questions that Jimenez might very well stumble upon one of these days, while navigating through the junkyards of this ravaged land.

Body Parts opens on 2 July 2011 and runs until the 28^th of the month at Mag:net Gallery, located at 335 Katipunan Avenue, Loyola Heights, Quezon City 1105. For inquiries, contact the gallery at 929.3191 or magnetgalleries@gmail.com.

Mostly these are slender elegant shapes perfectly poised in the air

One of the most ingenious artists hereabout is Pete Jimenez. A champion of direct sculpture inspired by Julio Gonzalez and Picasso in their expressive use of iron as medium, he has been fashioning steel discards into graceful forms that work as visual puns. This artist has a rich lode of creativity, energy and inspiration. Only three months since his previous exhibit and he was already presenting his latest output in “Bakal,” recently in Mag:net Gallery at Agcor Building, 335 Katipunan Ave., Loyola Heights, Quezon City. The prodigious energy can be gleaned from how much Jimenez wields his art in various mediums and excels in each. He is, in fact, not only a sculptor but a multimedia artist. An alumnus of the UP Artists’ Circle, he was a regional finalist in the 1998 Art Association of the Philippines National Centennial Painting Competition. He is also an award-winning TV commercial animation director and graphics designer, garnering the Best in Art Direction and Best in Animation awards for some of his projects at the 17^th Philippine Advertising Congress.

Natural shape and size

A Visual Communications graduate from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, Pete Jimenez demonstrates proficiency in visual communication by skillfully manipulating even the humblest objects such as discarded mechanical parts. Each artwork works as a semaphore that the common viewer can readily apprehend. The artist says he spends long hours working on a piece, spontaneously working on weekends only as he has a weekday job. He admits he picks up his ideas from movies, magazines, books and advertising, to which he is quite exposed, being manager of Optima Digital. Of his medium and technique, he says: “As much as possible, I don’t want to violate their natural shapes and sizes as I first saw them in the junk shops. Most of the time I just weld together several materials to come up with one piece. This is the beauty of steel or direct sculpture. It is very similar to doing collages.” He has consistently worked in and experimented with steel for over 10 years, one can say he has already mastered the medium. Whereas before it took him months to come up with a collection, now he is mounting two exhibits in half a year.

Verbal and visual grace

The artist’s creativity and inspiration are obviously on display in the visual grace he can draw from scraps and in the graceful wit of the pieces’ titles and allusions. The punning, both visual and verbal, can be both literal and metaphorical-sometimes banal but humorous, often surprising. In “Apple of My Eye,” parts of a cement mixer have been shaped and welded to look like the human eye, and a real apple is placed in the center for the pupil. “Old Navy” alludes to that brand of clothing apparel, while “Pixels” references those square shapes that appear in digital photography and video display. “Askal,” of course, is shaped like a dog (from the colloquial asong kalye, or “stray dog”), while “Pusakal” is cat (pusang kalye, or “stray cat”). A funny yet poignant piece that’s also a scathing commentary is “Miss Saigon,” consisting of what looks like an antique warhead topped by a rusty steering wheel. This evokes the chopper on the rooftop toward the end of the Vietnam War, an iconic image appropriated by the musical “Miss Saigon.” (To push the punning further, we’d swear there’s no more apt venue to showcase these metal pieces than Mag:net.)

Earthbound yet flighty

The mass of rusty metal may look heavy but these pieces’ essential grace and the titles with their associations make them feel buoyant-as contradictory as any in David Smith’s metal calligraphy and landscapes. Take, for example, “Worm’s-Eye View,” displayed in Jimenez’s exhibit “My Garage” in West Gallery in SM Megamall. With its density and volume, the bent rod looks positively earthbound, as if about to slip down from its base. Yet with the title, and after a second look, it suddenly feels lightweight. Mostly these are slender elegant shapes perfectly poised in the air, whether freestanding or wall-bound. Typical is “Same Feather,” like Brancusi’s metal rendition of a bird about to take wing. Often it is sheer ingenuity that makes the pieces seem lighter than they really are, as in the graceful vertical thrust and delicate construction of joined metal links in “Typhoon Belt” and “Tivo.” Sometimes a piece can appear random, such as “Warp,” in which metal plates seem to be haphazardly conjoined. Yet when one looks long and long, it slowly attains a beauty all its own.

Pete Jimenez, who has always found time to go hunting for junk steel in junk shops and mold them into pieces of fine art, lets us in on what it is like to be right where his workshop is in My Garage, his newest one-man exhibit at the West Gallery, SM Megamall. My Garage formally opens on February 9 and will run until February 21.

The featured works are among those Jimenez has been working on spontaneously these past few months. Bringing them all together at the gallery is a completely different ballgame for Jimenez. He lets other people do the final installations or curate his works. “As far as I am concerned, I have done my job already, and I always request somebody else to do it for me.”

Jimenez’s explanation is simple: “I’ve been so close and personal with my works during the long hours of working through these pieces, and it’s about time that they are seen and viewed from a different perspective or through the lens of a different eye. I always give whoever curates my works a free hand. They can take out some pieces or they can add more pieces. It’s their call. And with this approach, the curator’s work becomes a part of the total impact of the show for the viewing public.”

Indeed, fellow artist and longtime college friend, Nilo Ilarde, chose Jimenez’s tall yet slim steel works as the main attraction in My Garage. “He told me that the pieces look like different people with different personalities, characters, and attitudes.” Viewers will get the chance to see them better and perhaps get a more accurate impression as they enter the gallery.

While the steel discards may easily give Jimenez an idea as to how they will look after some welding, Jimenez also picks up ideas from movies, magazine articles, books, and advertising to which he is very much exposed on the job. He adds, “As much as possible, I don’t want to ‘violate’ their natural shapes and sizes as I first saw them in the junk shops. So, most of the time, I just weld together several materials to come up with one piece. This is the beauty of welded steel or direct sculpture. It is very similar to doing collages.”

To Jimenez, working on steel remains a continuing challenge, even as My Garage is already his 8^th one-man show. “Before, whenever I expose my works to the various elements to get the right texture and the effect of rust on these pieces, I could easily determine when it is already time to apply finishing coats of varnish. Now I’m learning that the different effects of the exposure to the elements are also dictated by the time or the month of the year in which I worked on those pieces. I am still awed and amazed…to see the results as very natural.”

Pete Jimenez took up visual communications at the UP College of Fine Arts and is currently the general manager of Optima Digital.

West Gallery is at the 4/L Building A, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City. For inquiries, call 634-1284.

In If the Shoe Fits, Jimenez shows us that his favorite weapon of choice — that is scrap iron, can be combined with wooden shoe lasts and have second lives as interesting art pieces.  The exhibit runs at The Water Dragon Gallery at the 2^nd Floor of the Yuchengco Museum from May 28 to June 20, 2009.

The shoe lasts are not new to Jimenez. These wooden pieces he got from Marikina have become mainstays in his studio-garage in Quezon City for more than 5 years now, waiting to be used at any point in time.  These shoe lasts were once a part of an article written about Jimenez (by Alya Honasan) when it was stated that his next plan was to incorporate these pieces together with his scrap iron.

It was a challenging task for Jimenez to create art pieces using the shoe lasts since it was his first time to ever think of works with wooden “shoes”.

On exhibit are about 20 pieces of varying sizes, from an 8-inch high “Iron Lady’s Crocs”, made up of an old flat iron and welded on a piece from a tractor used in the farm lands, to a 5-foot high “Principal’s Office”, made from flat bars that look like a slender rendition of a school chair with “shoes”.  Jimenez continues to love the challenge of creating new objects with recycled iron, which keeps him busy almost every weekend.  He also relishes how he has been able to show another angle of his creative side beyond his day job in the advertising post-production industry.

And his enthusiasm rubs off when you listen to him talk about his works.  “Guest Speaker” is one of the most unique pieces in this exhibit because “ I was able to use for the first time a pair of shoe last and a discarded gasoline tank of a motorcycle.  When I combined these with an old manual water pump, I already knew what shape it would take…it looks like an animated character! I would say it is a very powerful piece”.

Another piece that catches Jimenez’s eye is “Bell Bottom Blues”.  He describes it as a transparent-polka-dotted-skinny-jeans.  It is made up of cut-up pieces from an old steel matting used as fences during the 1950’s.  The material was given to him by an officemate who was about to throw it away.  “You will feel the motion as one looks at the pieces suggestive of the pose and footwork of Elvis Presley”, notes Jimenez.

Such ideas just come from everyday encounters, says Jimenez.  And when his mind captures them like Polaroid snapshots, he is definitely in his element.  Once he is in his studio-garage with all the scrap iron at his imaginative and creative disposal, get ready to be amazed.

Philippine Daily Inquirer
Sunday Inquirer Magazine
October 22, 2006

Sculptor Pete Jimenez’s medium may be heavy, but his message is anything but.

Ongoing until Oct. 31 at the Mag:net Gallery Paseo in Makati is sculptor Pete Jimenez’s third one-man show this year and his 10th since 2000, “Scrapyard,” where he showcases some 21 pieces of iron works made from his junkyard finds. That’s a lot of excursions to the junkyard in Antipolo and Fairview, where Jimenez heads on weekends to find the inspirations for his “direct sculpture,” the raw material he buys by the kilo.

“I like it because I don’t have to conceptualize anything from scratch,” he says of scrap iron. “I find a piece, and then crazy ideas come into my head.”

Thus, old metal strips that open like a flower become “Petal Attraction,” a work with recurring zeros and a hint of a number seven is called “Bond, James Bond,” and a hook with cartoonish toe-like protrusions becomes “Foot Spaa.” Fortunately, the 46-year-old University of the Philippines Fine Arts grad, who now manages a post-production house that edits TV commercials, had a whole year to prepare for his shows, having kept a low profile most of last year. With a welder assistant, he can complete a work in a weekend, since that’s his only free time from work. “I like to play,” he says. “The work I do is serious enough; you have to do what clients tell you all the time. Here, I can have complete freedom.”

Jimenez has been exercising this freedom since his college days. He dabbled in painting, even winning an Art Association of the Philippines award in 1998, but it was UP Artists Circle brod and fellow artist Rock Drilon who encouraged him to go three-dimensional. The fun is carried over to special requests; Jimenez recently made a gate for a friend’s house.

The artist gets his inspiration from the stuff he reads, the advertising industry he works in, and even the underwater world, as he’s a certified scuba diver. He also hangs out with wife Lissa, herself formerly with a production house, and two daughters. And no, he doesn’t like to use his formidable material to make serious monumental statements. As the critic Cid Reyes said of the artist, “Within a decade of dedicated and assiduous work, Jimenez has produced an impressive body of work distinguished not only for their wit and humor but also for the imaginative articulation of his core material: iron.” Says Jimenez: “I don’t like people over-analyzing my work. I want to make people happy. I like it when friends see my work on exhibit when they pass the gallery, and they text me, “You’re crazy!”

Business Mirror
October 1, 2008

How is an everyday object transformed into a work of art? An object may gain status through time in the same way that wisdom is often ascribed to age. A modest table or chair can turn into fine antique in many years. But not all objects are privileged to acquire such status. A rusty nail, spring or scrap metal, for instance, will never become priceless antiques and do not command center stage in the drama of everyday life. While many recognize these objects’ importance in the assembly line, they are merely part of something larger and are discarded once their usefulness expires. Pete Jimenez’s sculptures afford these seemingly insignificant objects the chance to undergo a transfiguration. From their humble origins in junkyards, they are given new lease in life and elevated into the status of “art.” These found objects are given formal coherence, expressive character and embodied with a “concept” in the hands of this talented artist.

Usually working without preliminary sketch, Jimenez allows his imagination to work spontaneously as he fashions them into beautiful art pieces. He starts with a single piece of material then adds another piece that has been welded onto another until the whole thing takes shape much like a collage. An arresting piece he made, entitled Instant Mami, consists of twisted round bars which were crushed and welded together to form a large rectangular shape reminiscent of the compacted dried noodles one finds inside a pack of instant noodles. Cathedral Window is made up of the body of nails without the head, bent and shaped into triangles. A recent piece, entitled After Shave, is made from an automobile spring and a cut-up liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cylinder with welded nails scattered on top, reminding one of stubbles left after shaving. Reviewing his works, one feels that Jimenez has breathed life into these inanimate objects. Many of his sculptures have been treated anthropomorphically. The cut –up LPG cylinder has suggested the head of Lola with open curls on top, or Mom with tighter and closed curls, of Batman with a Walkman, or of “Mr. Chairman” decked literally with the back of a wrought iron chair on top.

Another way by which found objects may be transformed into works of art is through labeling. Marcel Duchamp, for instance, transformed ready-mades into art by conveniently changing the labels. Unlike Duchamp’s “urinal” reborn as a “fountain,” Jimenez’s works do not attempt to conceal the origins of his humble pieces. His labels are appropriated from popular terms, often injecting local humor in the texts’ corruption of English words, such as Carabao English to label a sculpture that looks like a carabao; Is Knob (snob) to describe a piece made of knobs and metal; and Petal Attraction (Fatal Attraction) for a floral piece made of parts from a Volkswagen Beetle. His adroit verbal play is exemplified in titles like pusa(kal), a work made from the discarded parts of an old Singer sawing machine shaped to look like a cat; or Tupperware Party, which consists of a series of cut-up pipes whose hollow circular shapes look like the top of different sizes of food keepers.

The commonplace is highlighted by many labels such as Mango Shake, a moving, swinging piece that shakes when tapped and is made of round bars which are bent and twisted to take the shape of two interlocking outlines of a mango. A small piece, entitled Google Earth, looks like a transparent earth with little extended arms. According to Jimenez, the piece also looks like a lunar module or spaceship, and the little arms are like “motion speed lines that make you zoom in and out of earth.” A particularly interesting work is a brown vertical metal piece with holes, entitled Who ate my Toblerone? Jimenez’s works and their labels are also exercises on semiotic reading. Askal (stray dog) is a three-legged canine made of wood, ax and the wheels of delivery carts that look like a trike. The trike becomes indexical of a stray dog whose leg was run over by speeding cars along the highway. According to Jimenez, he conjures up the labels in the process of making his sculptures-sometimes half way through, while at other times “the work sits still for weeks without label.” Indeed, what gives life to his visual images are the verbal puns that accompany them. While Jimenez asserts that the works should be able to stand on their own, the labels have become part and parcel of his creations and give them a comic character, adding wit and vitality to each piece.

Jimenez relates that after a work is welded and he is truly satisfied with the result, he exposes it to the elements and “…in due time, it gathers a textural treatment that can only be done in nature.” Corrosion and the metal’s reaction to the various elements give his works a beautiful patina. The natural patina reminds us that these sculptures remain a part of everyday life; they do not rear their heads like monsters in new and shiny garbs but ubiquitously assert their “everydayness.” Paradoxically, therefore, while the found objects are transformed into art, we cannot help but recognize, in the words of W.J. T. Mitchell, “…the plain old thing with its homely, familiar name…., blushing and smirking at us in the spotlight of aesthetic attention, or ignoring us totally.” But why are we, as viewers, mesmerized by Jimenez’s works? While Jimenez takes his inspiration from Picasso’s assemblage works, the context in which these works were received is no longer viable. The surrealist deployment of the found object caused “shock” among the viewers as the uncanny was made to take the place of art. Today, however, we do not view Jimenez’s works with mouth agape, horrified by these humble objects’ apotheosis. We are rather drawn to them because the everyday objects assert a reality tangible enough for us to experience. In an age where reality is virtual, Jimenez’s sculptures comfort us with the knowledge that we can continue to see, feel and touch objects.

Philippine Daily Inquirer
September 15, 2008
Lifestyle Section

Pete Jimenez’s scrap metal sculptures are shot through with energy and wit-maybe because he has such a great time making them.

“It looked like an insect,” says Federico “Pete” Jimenez. “I still remember.” The artist is talking about the very first metal sculpture he ever made from found objects, an “experimental” assignment for his class with National Artist Napoleon Abueva, at the University of the Philippines College of fine Arts, where he graduated in 1982 as a Visual Communications major. Then Jimenez pulls out a pen and begins to draw the work from memory on a paper napkin, an assemblage of metal gears, with one jagged ring cut in two to make curving antennae for a round head. So where is the historic piece now? “I can’t find it,” he says, with a bemused shrug. “I think my father sold it for scrap.” It’s just the kind of matter-of-fact reality check that keeps the talented Jimenez terribly grounded. “I don’t think I have any angst,” he says with a chuckle. “Well, maybe I have some inside me, but it’s definitely not the dark kind.” There’s the fact that the scrap-metal vendors who know him very well as a regular suki can’t figure out why he wants ugly stuff instead of shiny new metal. Youngest daughter Julia, 8, once described her father’s work as mainly “ayun, pukpok-pukpok, pako-pako” (hammer-hammer, nail-nail). Then there’s also the fact that, as manager of the post production house Optima, Jimenez has a day job that’s filled with stress, deadlines, and a lot of the self-depreciating humor that you’d expect from folks in the advertising industry. (His colleagues like to call him bakal boy.)

Humor

The humor is evident in both Jimenez’s actual works and the tongue-in-cheek titles he gives them. Thus, when friends learned that this amiable husband and father of two- the older daughter is Frances, 11-entitled his latest one-man show “Nail Spa,” they knew he was referring to machine parts, not manicures-although he does finish the pieces with a weatherproof topcoat. (The show is ongoing until Sept. 16 in West gallery at SM Megamall.) The nails in question are the large, rough metal specimens that held down old wooden railroad ties, and which Jimenez bought by the sackful at P5 per nail some years back. “I don’t have a studio, so I work in my garage, and those sacks were just dumped there,” he says. “Everyday, the nails would look at me, torturing me, telling me, ‘O, when are you going to use us?’” Considering that the 48-year-old Jimenez used to work as an animator for production houses-he apprenticed with the late great Larry Alcala-one can just imagine what those taunting critters looked like in his mind’s eye. In adspeak, the nails became Jimenez’s “creative handle,” leading to such whimsical pieces as “Twister,” nails popping out of a large spring; “Soldiers,” a tight bunch of nails of different textures and heights, all capped with heads that look like World War II helmets; and “Meeting,” a bowl fringed with nails facing each other over some implied conference table. There are other pieces that depart from the theme, like “Mango Shake,” a metal rod shaped into the outline of the fruit and mounted on a spring to keep it perpetually bouncing, a tabletop treat. Indeed, because of the movement in the lines and the placement of the details, you know the pieces are solid steel-but you expect them to suddenly jump, transform, or do something else, like a flash of light or a sci-fi creature come to life. (Speaking of sci-fi, check out the piece “Mr. Roboto,” another springy alien.) The 20-odd pieces in the show range from tile-size wall hangings and tabletop accents, to large standing sculpture and the aforementioned spring-powered jiggling works. All were made from hammered pieces of scrap metal and steel objects Jimenez found on his weekend “pamamalengke” (marketing) trips to the junkyards in Antipolo and Quezon City.

More Discriminating

Over the years, Jimenez admits, ever since his one-man show in 2000, he has learned to be more discriminating “shopper” when he heads out to the junkyards. “For my first two or three shows, I would hoard everything I saw,” he recounts. “My wife Lissa would complain that the mess was becoming an eyesore.” Now he zooms in on anything that looks different or interesting, whether it’s a big, battered old wok he fashioned into moon-shaped wall piece, or a bunch of unusual nuts and bolts he piled onto a curved, free standing pole to stimulate the vertebrae on a human spine. (Title: “Everything ISpine.”) “That’s why I’m always excited about my ‘shopping’ trips,” Jimenez says with a glee. “I never know what I’m going to find.” He is also always on the lookout for “moments that don’t happen often,” like the time he was driving home to Fairview and passed a group of scrap-metal workers by the side of the road, vigorously hammering the shell of an old Volkswagen Beetle. Jimenez screeched to a stop. “They were going to weigh the parts to be sold for scrap, and I ended up buying them the entire thing, including the bumpers.” The curved fenders ended up as the petals of a huge standing flower in an imposing work called “Petal Attraction,” which is featured along with some of Jimenez’s other works in the book “The world of Best Art,” a folio on selected Filipino artists recently published in New York. Most finds end up on top of his work table, a Lazy Susan on which he welds components together, constantly spinning to see the work-in-progress from all angles. He’d put things together without sketches and studies in a method known as direct sculpture, adding, subtracting, bending, and breaking as he goes, and always listening to what the pieces tell him. That’s why fellow artist Rock Drilon once noted that Jimenez was effective largely because he never violated the basic forms of objects. Only experience has taught Jimenez to discern whether or not a piece is finished-“something they don’t teach you in college,” he muses-and even that could still change. “I could be happy with something, sleep on it, and then take it apart and start all over again the next day.” Some works take a weekend, others take several weeks of agonizing-not because of intense emotions, but because Jimenez likes to work fast and only feels satisfied after the execution. “And then I feel rested. Sarap ng feeling.” Sometimes, he’ll see something instantly, and will have a name for the piece from the get-go. Other times, the work will sit unchristened for weeks. Right now, there are more critters sitting in his garage and taunting Jimenez anew: sacks full of used wooden shoe molds. A new material? “I still have to see.” He has several ideas for more functional works for a future show-which means the molds have been doing a lot of talking. Still, because he’s got a life, Jimenez’s weekend creative process can always be interrupted by lunch with the family, or errands he has to run for Lissa. “Don’t ask me for an artistic statement,” Jimenez says with a laugh. “I just like to have fun, recycle things, find something that will challenge me. It’s a freewheeling thing.” “Despite the weight of these sculptures, they project a deceiving weightlessness and an airy majesty,” writes Cid Reyes of Jimenez’s work in “The World of Best Art.” “The works, however, do not take themselves seriously, but rather wink in knowing, conspiratorial eye at the viewer.” The best part is, after delighting in Pete Jimenez’s ingenuity, you’ll feel like winking back.