Mother Boat

Olivia d'Aboville, Basia Goszczynska, Camille Hoffman, Joanna Vasquez Arong

June 2nd - September 2nd, 2021
Pintô International, New York

The archipelago of the Philippines has always been home to seafaring people, creating deep bonds between inhabitants and the bodies of water they border. This relationship has grown increasingly complex: scientists project that by 2050 there could be more plastic in the ocean than fish, and the Philippines is one of the largest markets for single-use plastic. American inventors patented the flexible, plastic food pouch in 1955, and by the 1980s these sachets inundated the Philippines and other worldwide markets, eventually polluting international waterways. Considering the contemporary implications of a unified, global outcry for the health of our oceans, Pintô International is pleased to present multi-faceted site-specific projects by four artists who, in the specter of climate change, respond to the call of the sea, the “mother boat” for us all: Olivia d’Aboville, Basia Goszczynska, Camille Hoffman, and Joanna Vasquez Arong.

The troubling flood of plastics preoccupies French-Filipino artist Olivia d'Aboville. Her installation Catch of the Day reminds viewers that our relationship to the sea requires re-evaluation and maintenance.  Her work simultaneously engages with the contemporary crises of climate change and oceanic pollution. Working with local artists, d’Aboville sewed thousands of discarded plastic sachets into a light-reflecting installation. While d’Aboville’s work urgently confronts viewers with a visceral representation of humanity’s waste, several works from the series, most notably her woven wall work My Womb is Your Ocean, also become a poetic counterpoint that honors the life-giving role the world’s oceans play.

The choking of our shared waters with consumer waste is an international issue and Brooklyn-based artist Basia Goszczynska’s sculptures create a trans-pacific dialogue with the work of Arong, d’Aboville, and Hoffman. Goszczynska creates her vessel-like forms from shards of discarded ones that she and fellow artist Don Elwing find washing up in Hawaii: baskets, crates, and bottles, all patinated by the sun, salt, and sea. Stitching together these fragments into a new whole, the work emphasizes the artist’s desire to repair not only objects, but the earth. Each vessel rests on its own pedestal—which also serves as the shipping crate for the work—built from salvaged wood scraps and stamped with cautionary "fragile" symbols. 

New York-based artist Camille Hoffman also uses discarded materials, but from her own life, to create works that relate to the seafaring history of her ancestors in the Philippines. Her twisting, vessel-like wall works evoke forms of  the ocean’s inhabitants and forces: shell- and wave-shapes worn by the water, bleached by the sun. Juxtaposed against an immersive wall-installation of water imagery, Hoffman’s works conjure a sense of the sacred via use of materials from the present; they are made from plastic mermaid-printed tablecloths, healthcare letters, and plaster. On one hand, Hoffman creates a meaningful dialogue about the adaptive reuse of the detritus that pollutes our waterways, but also she uses these visual metaphors of the ocean to ask: what does it mean in this day and age to connect with her ancestors’ history and culture from a distant place?

Confronting viewers in the main gallery space, both as an usher and a bookend to the wider installation, Joanna Vasquez Arong’s video Sampit sa Dagat (Call of the Sea) immerses viewers in sweeping, meditative shots of the ocean, and establishes an environment for the other works in the exhibition. Sampit sa Dagat begins with fishermen pushing their boat through the ocean swell; a kite-surfer miraculously seems to defy gravity; culminating with the artist taking us beneath the surface. Becoming an apt metaphor for our subconscious, the Filipino artist’s video tours us through the deep with arresting views of life undersea. Throughout the film, a narrator speaks in Cebuano, and another woman sings us a lullaby. We are momentarily transported as the film shifts between drama and calm, the contemporary and ancestral.

The exhibition is inspired by the Philippines' complex relationship with the bodies of water that surround the archipelago, and it encourages us to reshape our relationship with the ocean. Together, these works form a constellation of meditations on the sea that yield both regional and global implications.  With the specter of climate change ever present, our world is becoming more and more liquid by the day. The works in this exhibition make a case for the continued importance of the ancient mother boat—the ocean—that connects us all.

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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, New York

There 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.

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Pintô International is pleased to announce Our Islands, Their People: Becoming Archipelago, the first of a novel program of exhibitions that will spark conversations between Filipino contemporary artists, and their counterparts in the Americas and Caribbean who share a similar colonial past.

Drawing from Our Islands and Their People, as Seen with Camera and Pencil (1899) a book that first highlighted the parallels between the Philippines and other countries subjected to Spanish and American colonization, this exhibition connects artistic practices that explore indigenous identity, today. All the artists included in the show variously undertake an identitarian voyage to reimagine fluid notions of being indigenous to a place. In doing so, they deconstruct and elaborate on their distinctive homeland’s visual and material heritage. Through a cross-cultural lens, the works here included layer local mythologies, symbols, and beliefs with personal memories and popular culture, in order to resist strict geographical and ethnic categorizations.

This idiosyncratic approach is explicit in the playful ceramic works of Chiapas-born artist Alejandro Garcia Contreras, who freely mixes contemporary pop culture with Mexican folklore and Mayan myths and symbolism to build densely multilayered material narratives already present in today’s global culture. Similarly, the Filipino artist Leeroy New creates pop-colored masks that tap into the creative power of cross-cultural imagination, overcoming national and societal borders. 

Other artists critically re-appropriate narratives of cultural representation to portray their identitarian struggle: for instance, Eric Zamuco's video Goldilock’s Principle (2009) questions how truly voluntary is the process of assimilation of a dominant culture. On the other hand, the Filipinx multimedia artist Caroline Garcia is fascinated by her own unexplainable longing for the Philippines and its culture, despite having never lived in the country.

Artist Miguel Payano Jr. explores through his work the identity of today’s global citizen as an organic blend of languages and cultures. Informed by his African-American, Caribbean and Chinese heritage, he sees transculturality as a key trait of younger generations' identity, which provides hope for a more egalitarian future.

Other artists undertake a quest for decolonialization by reinterpreting concepts of cultural memory and postcolonial nationality. This is the case of artist Ulrik Lopez, who embarks on a thorough anthropological research to find elements of an “identitarian code” within the heterogeneous and fragmented Caribbean culture.

Others focus on deconstructing our collective representations of indigeneity: Filipinx artist Sara Jimenez explores the material embodiment of deep transcultural memories. Mauritian Shiraz Bayjoo dissects the grammar and power dynamics ingrained in the relationship between colonizing and colonized cultures. Filipinx artist Maia Cruz Palileo's paintings imaginatively include elements from both family oral history and colonial archival images. Through these different strategies, the artists define a narrative that counters the traditional Westerner-centered perspective. 

This is also the approach of the two "Western" artists included in the show: Nicholas Galanin, Alaskan of Tlingit and Unangax descent, and Cannupa Hanska Luger, New Mexico-based and of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota and European descendants. In their works, they both address the widespread misappropriation of Indigenous visual and material culture as a result of the impact of colonialism and collective amnesia. They instead propose to build an artistic continuum that celebrates Indigenous culture and its people, and define new narratives for a "21st Century Indigeneity.” 

By reflecting on a broader set of novel sociocultural trends emerging today, the show channels and expand Edouard Glissant's original concept of "creolization", ie the process of cultural mixing that resulted from slavery, plantation culture, and colonialism. In response to this, the exhibition suggests an alternative and more universal notion of “indigeneity”, which places this mosaic of multi-layered identities within the frame of the transcultural and transnational archipelago we live in today. 

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The archipelago of the Philippines has always been home to seafaring people, creating deep bonds between inhabitants and the bodies of water they border. This relationship has grown increasingly complex: scientists project that by 2050 there could be more plastic in the ocean than fish, and the Philippines is one of the largest markets for single-use plastic. American inventors patented the flexible, plastic food pouch in 1955, and by the 1980s these sachets inundated the Philippines and other worldwide markets, eventually polluting international waterways. Considering the contemporary implications of a unified, global outcry for the health of our oceans, Pintô International is pleased to present multi-faceted site-specific projects by four artists who, in the specter of climate change, respond to the call of the sea, the “mother boat” for us all: Olivia d’Aboville, Basia Goszczynska, Camille Hoffman, and Joanna Vasquez Arong.

The troubling flood of plastics preoccupies French-Filipino artist Olivia d'Aboville. Her installation Catch of the Day reminds viewers that our relationship to the sea requires re-evaluation and maintenance.  Her work simultaneously engages with the contemporary crises of climate change and oceanic pollution. Working with local artists, d’Aboville sewed thousands of discarded plastic sachets into a light-reflecting installation. While d’Aboville’s work urgently confronts viewers with a visceral representation of humanity’s waste, several works from the series, most notably her woven wall work My Womb is Your Ocean, also become a poetic counterpoint that honors the life-giving role the world’s oceans play.

The choking of our shared waters with consumer waste is an international issue and Brooklyn-based artist Basia Goszczynska’s sculptures create a trans-pacific dialogue with the work of Arong, d’Aboville, and Hoffman. Goszczynska creates her vessel-like forms from shards of discarded ones that she and fellow artist Don Elwing find washing up in Hawaii: baskets, crates, and bottles, all patinated by the sun, salt, and sea. Stitching together these fragments into a new whole, the work emphasizes the artist’s desire to repair not only objects, but the earth. Each vessel rests on its own pedestal—which also serves as the shipping crate for the work—built from salvaged wood scraps and stamped with cautionary "fragile" symbols. 

New York-based artist Camille Hoffman also uses discarded materials, but from her own life, to create works that relate to the seafaring history of her ancestors in the Philippines. Her twisting, vessel-like wall works evoke forms of  the ocean’s inhabitants and forces: shell- and wave-shapes worn by the water, bleached by the sun. Juxtaposed against an immersive wall-installation of water imagery, Hoffman’s works conjure a sense of the sacred via use of materials from the present; they are made from plastic mermaid-printed tablecloths, healthcare letters, and plaster. On one hand, Hoffman creates a meaningful dialogue about the adaptive reuse of the detritus that pollutes our waterways, but also she uses these visual metaphors of the ocean to ask: what does it mean in this day and age to connect with her ancestors’ history and culture from a distant place?

Confronting viewers in the main gallery space, both as an usher and a bookend to the wider installation, Joanna Vasquez Arong’s video Sampit sa Dagat (Call of the Sea) immerses viewers in sweeping, meditative shots of the ocean, and establishes an environment for the other works in the exhibition. Sampit sa Dagat begins with fishermen pushing their boat through the ocean swell; a kite-surfer miraculously seems to defy gravity; culminating with the artist taking us beneath the surface. Becoming an apt metaphor for our subconscious, the Filipino artist’s video tours us through the deep with arresting views of life undersea. Throughout the film, a narrator speaks in Cebuano, and another woman sings us a lullaby. We are momentarily transported as the film shifts between drama and calm, the contemporary and ancestral.

The exhibition is inspired by the Philippines' complex relationship with the bodies of water that surround the archipelago, and it encourages us to reshape our relationship with the ocean. Together, these works form a constellation of meditations on the sea that yield both regional and global implications.  With the specter of climate change ever present, our world is becoming more and more liquid by the day. The works in this exhibition make a case for the continued importance of the ancient mother boat—the ocean—that connects us all.

Follow us on Instagram for details.

Faith, 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.

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There 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.