Aliens of Manila: NY Colony

Current Exhibition

Under The Bells
Cian Dayrit, Kawayan de Guia, Nona GarciaOctober 16, 2019 - February 29, 2020
Pintô International, 431 E 12th St (#5B), New YorkFaith, religion, and spirituality are powerful forces in the Philippines. Catholicism, the archipelago's predominant faith, colors all aspects of local culture. This exhibition brings together the work of three artists to demonstrate not only how the country's Catholic history provides fruitful subject matter for artists (be it from a position of critique or careful analysis), but how this history and its iconography becomes indigenized, adapted, and filtered. The work of Cian Dayrit, Kawayan de Guia, and Nona Garcia confronts the paradoxes inherent in religion, calling into question the purity of singular religious identity.The exhibition's title refers to how the lives of Filipinos have been organized around religion. For 400 years, Filipinos have lived debajo de las campanas (i.e., under the bells) of the church. As the Spanish colonized the archipelago, they consolidated dispersed peoples into pueblos with the church at the center of town life. Church bells would dictate the day's events and summon villagers to worship. The parish priest often wielded dominant power in the pueblo, and so Filipinos have lived "under the bells" of Catholicism, figuratively and literally. As the works of Dayrit, de Guia, and Garcia demonstrate, religion often becomes uniquely hybridized "under the bells" as Catholicism blends with pre-Hispanic traditions of spirituality. Cian Dayrit's textile works engage with faith-based symbols to analyze the images, objects, and institutions that dictate what power "is." In his works, created especially for this exhibition, Dayrit monumentalizes the anting-anting, a type of charm often inscribed into handkerchiefs carried by Filipinos. Intended to protect the carrier from harm, Dayrit embroiders his works with an imagined iconography and Latin words, creating a constructed sense of mysticism and spirituality.Kawayan de Guia's surreal, tableaux-like paintings emerge as "portraits" of indigenous figures in museological settings. Based in the Cordillera mountain range north of Manila, de Guia's paintings engage with the changing nature of this region in the face of modernization and development, as well as the region's spirituality. The figures are surrounded by European paintings, globes, and bulols, pre-Hispanic representations of spirits or ancestors carved in the Cordillera region. De Guia's works consider the fallout when ancestral spirits collide with Western culture.Nona Garcia's haunting light boxes are the latest iteration of her ongoing x-rays of statues of saints. Catholic families frequently place saintly icons in their homes, which offer the devoted paths to spiritual and physical healing. Garcia seeks to reveal the materiality of the statues, while bestowing upon them a sense of otherworldly presence. She channels the traditions of Philippine spirituality, may it be pre- or post-colonial, into her surroundings and takes an objective look beneath the surface of venerated objects.Follow us on Instagram for details.

As appeared on Phil Inquirer, The FilAm

Past Exhibitions

50 Years in Hollywood
A Group Exhibition:
Alexandre Arrechea, Alexis Zambrano, Allora & Calzadilla,
Eileen Isagon Skyers, Joiri Minaya, Manuel Ocampo, Pow Martinez.June 20 - September 30, 2019
Pintô International, 431 E 12th St (#5B), New YorkThere is a saying in the Philippines: the country's colonial history can be described as living 300 years in a convent, and 50 years in Hollywood. After three centuries of Spanish rule, the Treaty of Paris (1898) marked a new chapter of colonialism in the Philippines. After a relatively brief — albeit bitter — war, Spain ceded control of the archipelago (along with Guam and Puerto Rico) to the United States for the paltry sum of $20 million, heralding an era of expansionism and the birth of what would become, over the next half-century, the American colonial enterprise in the Philippines. “We have a right to ask the support of every lover of peace, of every believer in peace, for the righteous policy we have pursued in the Philippines,” claimed Theodore Roosevelt in a 1900 speech. Like any colonial project, altruistic rhetoric masked cultural hegemony, racism, and systematic oppression as the United States sought to remake the Philippines, among other colonial territories, in its own image.Reflecting on the history of American colonialism, a history under-acknowledged by many Americans, this exhibition seeks to situate the work of contemporary Filipino artists in conversation with artists who are connected to other countries that were once subject to colonial incursions by the United States and Spain, such as Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, among others. Consequently, this exhibition will point towards the lingering resonances of this episode of the American imperial project, and colonialism more broadly, while foregrounding shared themes of migration, hybridity, and hegemony. Building on the work of the 1998 exhibition '98: Cien Años Despues, which was organized at the Cultural Center of the Philippines on the centennial of the Spanish-American War, this project advances an artistic dialogue of cultural diplomacy, celebrating commonalities and differences between Filipino artists and those of other international backgrounds.Manuel Ocampo’s paintings deploy a sweeping array of art historical and pop culture references as a critique of colonialism, past and present. Eileen Isagon Skyers’s video Songwriter (2019) takes viewers on a journey through the ever-changing topography of present-day Philippines, suturing together imagery shot in and around Manila alongside renderings of planned real estate developments. Alexis Zambrano’s work considers how the entangled histories of Philippines, Spain, and the so-called “New World” unfolded through networks of trade and religion. One of the founding members of Los Carpinteros, Alexandre Arrechea employs visual metaphors to engage social themes of inequity, cultural disenfranchisement, and the disputed position of art in a global, media-driven society. Joiri Minaya investigates the emergence of tropical print fabrics, which were popularized in the 40’s and 50’s, a time when American imperialist insertion and presence in Latin American and the Caribbean was at its peak. With humor and satire, Pow Martinez’s paintings investigate the psychology of colonialism, connecting it to present day cultures of fear and consumerism. Allora & Calzadilla’s sculpture Loss (2017) considers the history of oranges. The first crop introduced by Columbus to the New World, oranges have since become a billion-dollar industry in the United States, but it legally prevents the commodity’s export from Puerto Rico to protect continental markets.Follow us on Instagram for details.Aliens of Manila: New York Colony
An Installation by Leeroy NewMarch 9 - May 27, 2019
Pintô International, 431 E 12th St (#5B), New YorkPintô International launched its quarterly exhibitions program on March 9, 2019 with the opening of Aliens of Manila: New York Colony, an immersive site-specific installation by artist and designer Leeroy New, curated by Pintô director Luca Parolari, that initiated the organization’s new regularly programmed global exhibitions and event series.To inaugurate the program, Pintô International’s East Village headquarters hosted contemporary Philippine artist, Leeroy New for am artist residency throughout February 2019. During this time, New created an immersive, site-specific installation responding to the structure of the space. The artist engineered Aliens of Manila: New York Colony a warping, psychedelic sculpture constructed from food covers, flexible conduit, fiberglass strips, cable ties, and other materials that clings to the architecture of Pintô’s East Village loft. The sculpture comprises materials from recycling centers, surplus shops, dollar stores, and industrial market districts local to New York.New also presented a series of wearable sculptures — an extension of his design projects in interdisciplinary design and architecture — for his ongoing Aliens of Manila project. Started in 2014, Aliens of Manila is an artistic series referencing and re-appropriating the archetypal New York street-style photography. For the project, the artist, his friends, and local collaborators don the costumes in public as a kind of “material conduit” between the artist and the environment. This “staged displacement” creates a literal and visual duality between the native and the “alien.” The series speaks to the wider experience of cultural displacement but is profoundly informed by the artist’s own familial experience with the phenomenon of what he refers to as “OFW” — Overseas Filipino Workers.New’s Aliens of Manila made also public appearances in New York City throughout the week of the exhibition opening. Follow us on Instagram for details.

As appeared on ArtNet, ArtNews, The Brooklyn Rail, ABS-CBN, Asian Journal, Asia Art Archive, Tatler, The Architect's Newspaper, Phil Inquirer, Flaunt, SCOUT Mag, Nolisoli, Office Magazine

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