X Marks the Spot: Filipinx Futurities
Curated by Dr. Marissa Largo, scholar of Asian diasporic contemporary art, X Marks the Spot takes the X in “Filipinx” as a theoretical and methodological intervention in curation. The X signals an intergenerational relationality – a sort of “call and response” – between recognized and rising practitioners working on Turtle Island that speaks to the legacies, influences, and transformations of Filipinx visual art in last decade.
These relationalities generously explore themes such as spiritual healing and hauntings (Cruz x Garay), queer recuperations of colonial gazes and consumerist desire (Manapul x Velasco), and migration, movement, and transcendence (Gonzales x Villanueva). Marking “the spot” identifies our particular moment in time and space that gives rise to aesthetic possibilities that imagine and embody diasporic Filipinx subjectivity.
They transcend nationhood, normativity, capitalist aspirations, and colonial temporality. These investigations take form through sculpture, painting, video, and photocollage and propose alternative engagements with space, place, materiality, selfhood, and community that defy modernism’s limiting ideologies. Beyond identitarian politics, X Marks the Spot, gestures to the multifarious ways in which diasporic Filipinx artists invent aesthetic futurities as an emancipatory practice.More information: https://filipinext.ca/exhibition
ARTISTS:
Patrick Cruz X Excel Garay
Julius Poncelet Manapul X John Ephraim Velasco
Ella Gonzales X Revill Villanueva
