‘The past is a foreign country’
A rchivo 1984 gallery recently presented Jill Paz’s first solo exhibition in the country called
The Past is a Foreign Country. It was also the gallery’s inaugural exhibition in its new space on Chino Roces Ave. in Makati City.
Jill Paz focuses on images as object survivors of the past. The underlying theme of memory is reinterpreted by the artist as an exploration of renovation, embodied in her own experience of cultural loss. She explores this through homage paintings on cardboard, wood and canvas based on the work of her great-granduncle Felix
Resurreccion Hidalgo.
Paz was born in Manila in 1982 and migrated to the US in 1983. She studied Art History at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and attended an independent studio residency at Parsons School of Design in New York, before pursuing a master’s degree at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio.
In 2015, Paz exhibited at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada. Last year, she had exhibitions at the Columbus Museum of Art
and the Beeler Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, as well as the Alte Feuerwache Loschwtiz in Dresden, Germany, where she was a visiting artist at Kunsthaus Raskolnikow and Geh8.
I first fell in love with her works at this year’s Philippine Art Fair when Miguel Rosales showed me her artworks. I begged Archivo’s Marti Magsanoc to reserve me one when she would have her show in the Philippines. Among the largest works in the show was the eight-foot
Untitled (After Hidalgo, Libertatem) (2015), composed of cardboard panels etched with a phantasmic composition inspired by the artist’s ancestor and a personal childhood memory. In Untitled (Balikayan Box, It’s a Journey Back that I’m Always
Taking) (2015), Paz has fashioned an LBC box with photographic images of her family home. This is the same balikbayan box that has traveled with her from the Philippines to the US and back.
These compositions were actually burned into the substrata by a laser cutter, a device that can translate a digital image into an etching. With such an unorthodox process, imperfections are rendered into an otherwise perfect production. The works stem from the artist’s fascination with how images traverse our visual and material culture, and fall within a long-standing artistic reconsideration of the idea of painting.
(Archivo 1984 is located at Pasillo 18, La Fuerza Compound, 2241 Chino Roces Ave., Makati City.) Certain photos by PEPPER TEEHANKEE on a Leica C Digital Camera