'The Signing' - Founding Fathers, Freedom, Now and Then

   The building of empires and nations through colonization has always fascinated me. The previous work, ‘Desert Bloom - Gold Rush’ put me on a journey researching California as the land of Native Americans, as a pre-statehood territory of the Spanish Empire, as a stage for the westward advance of American colonies. Migration has always been a constant with cultures, even those deeming themselves ‘native’ to a land, as any ancestry is linked to movement literally across the globe. We are all linked to the first migrations of modern humans beginning around 100,000 years ago out of Africa. 

   I am the product, genetically and culturally, of colonization. I am a descendant of an extended family in the Philippines, once part of the US Commonwealth, and before that, a colony of the Spanish Empire for almost 400 years. My 23 and Me genetic analysis shows I am not only of Malay, Indonesian, and Filipino but Chinese, Spanish, English, French and German with a tiny bit of Native American ancestry. For centuries, Spain maintained trade with Asia through the port of Manila, from which Spanish galleons regularly sailed back and forth to Acapulco, Mexico, then known as the Viceroyalty of Spain. 

The latest piece, ‘The Signing’, is based on a famous painting by Howard Chandler Christy depicting the signing of the US Constitution, signed by all ‘founding fathers’ except Thomas Jefferson. The Bill of Rights soon followed. I was fascinated by how these ‘founding fathers’, predominantly wealthy white men, many of whom were slave owners, ended up building the foundation of government and concepts of individual rights. They are quite the contrast to the broad diversity of LGBTQ, Me Too, Black Lives Matter America. It’s safe to say those guys did not have people like me, a gay person of color, in mind, regarding the Bill of Rights. 

Individual freedom and equality are yet potentially volatile, even in 2020. Having witnessed the demonstrations over George Floyd’s death, expanding the Black Lives Matter movement around the world, having experienced racism and homophobia in my own life, I wanted to somehow use fragments of Christy’s painting with the founding fathers to comment on the fragility of ideals. Equality is still something that must be fought for and built upon, constantly evolving, 

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Desert Bloom, A Landscape of Thought

I shy from cliches, especially activities seemingly over-selfied on Instagram or social media. The Antelope Valley desert bloom attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors to this landscape about an hour outside of Los Angeles. Dozens of species of native plants carpet the mountains, foothills and fields in their spring bloom of yellow gold, orange, blue and purple for hundreds of square miles. I finally went to see it this season, as it was an occasion to escape the city and the doldrums of COVID lockdown. I wasn’t disappointed to witness nature’s power to inspire awe. The piece, ‘Desert Bloom - Gold Rush’, started with wanting to use the photos from the visit somehow, and evolve my interest in Mayan glyphs. 

I learned the Antelope Valley was much a part of the gold rush history with the Kern River as an important prospect mining site. Immigrants from all over tried to stake their claim and work the land in search of riches. Among them were Native Americans, Mexicans, South Americans, Chinese, colonists and pioneers driven to the west coast. Indigenous tribes, the Spanish Empire, the United States of Mexico and the expanding American colonies have vied to control or own this land, in the pre-statehood era of California. Impressions of many distinct peoples and cultures that lived the land, and the native plants, the poppies flourishing here for eons more, made me think about ideas of permanence, and the greater force of change, flux. 

These thoughts emerged in images used in the piece. Among the layers of collage of discarded newsprint, magazines and posters, I integrated photo transfers of the blooming poppy landscape with other symbols: the Chinese symbol for land, carved and torn into the side of the composition, a carved out map portion fo the Kern river, drip painted in gold, and graffiti inspired text of the word ‘native’, cut and ripped in areas at the bottom left. Paint, plaster and pencil are used to blur edges of images between layers. 

I wanted the piece to have a haphazard look, like some of the abandoned billboards or dilapidated city walls I’ve come across. I was hoping to generate some renewed tension and conceptual possibilities in a loose composition of imagery, emulating somewhat these mayan glyphs, creating new meaning in multiple juxtapositions of pictograms. I could see a web of ideas and imagery all related to the landscape, implicating time, old and new, cultures, people, all connected through unrelenting mutability. I feel like I’m wandering the ancient landscape again, as well as the landscape of ideas. 

'Believe Me' - A Trumpism

I’ve been studying glyphs lately. All kinds of them: petroglyphs, hieroglyphics, and Mayan glyphs in particular. I’m intrigued by their varying structures and ways particular symbols are assembled in a format to generate meaning, an idea or a word. How do you create meaning?  Or, how do you find meaning in today’s world? That’s a broader question I’ve been asking myself as we are incessantly surrounded by streaming video, social media, conflicting politics, and the noisy demands of consumerist culture. 

The phenomenon of fake news and real fake video is tearing down trust and access to facts and hard earned knowledge in everything from science and medicine to written history. Looking at the beauty of Mayan glyphs, each one presenting a collection of individual picture symbols, all in a unified, compact form, I’m drawn to how apparently random the picture symbols seem. Each of them or a combination of them denote phonetics completing the full word, represented by the glyph. It’s this initial randomness of picture symbols, conspiring to form words, meaning, that fascinated me.

Perhaps, the letters forming words of any language may look random to someone who is not fluent in that language. I wanted to begin exploring this idea of random but distinct images combined singularly in a work, that might convey new meaning or the impression of one. 

The global pandemic has generated real distrust in federal governments for their lack of foresight, empathy or concern for the real gravity of the disease’s spread and destruction, especially in the US. I had come across news articles that have tallied the oft-repeated catch phrases of POTUS: Trumpisms. One I liked for it’s cliched irony - ‘believe me’ - had echoed so many distrusted politicians in the past. This phrase served as imagery for this piece, also called ‘Believe Me’. I had been put on furlough from my job as a result of the spread of COVID-19 back in mid-March, and suddenly the country was made aware of the glaring importance of washing your hands, social distancing and wearing masks.

I felt I wanted to use an image of my hand as part of the piece, and to push the exploration of making my own Mayan glyph. The orange painted circular forms came from looking at data visualization graphics, depicting the spread of COVID cases in this country and the planet. The back and forth process of of building up the layers of collage and subtracting from it through the ripping, tearing and cutting into the surface, continues to evolve. It’s an evolution of process, influenced by archaeology, seeded years ago by studying fossils of ancient life, revealed through layers of sediment. 

Soul - Excavation of Language and Image

In previous work, I explored subjects about ancient life hundreds of millions of years old like species of jellies, dragonflies, horseshoe crabs still in existence today. I wanted to contrast that somehow with the immediacy of change in modern society, whose future existence seems to hinge on the chaos of global warming and climate change, disruptive technology, the threat of fake news and real fake videos, and global pollution. I’m fascinated that modern humans have been around for little more than 200,000 years yet the planet is over 4 billions years old. Ancient life has occupied the planetary timeline for billions of years - humans a mere sliver of that. Scientists are now warning of the extinction of millions of species - and perhaps eventually our own - in the coming decades driven by human causes of industrial and urban output, unbridled destruction of natural habitat, and the ceaseless hunger for natural resources. Human life feels fleeting and its existence short in the timeline of the universe. 

This ephemeral notion is something I’ve been exploring over the years through collage and using discarded materials: billboard vinyl, newsprint, ad posters, magazines, book pages, any mass produced imagery suggestive of the consumptive and disposable society of now. Collage would be interspersed with large transfers of photos taken of jellyfish, dragonfly wings, moths - symbols of ancient life with some species exhibiting relatively unchanged morphologies across hundreds of millions of years. Stenciled text and abstract shapes are a recent introduction in a further exploration of pop culture in ads and social media. 

This piece, ‘Soul’, has put text, as an experiment, front and center instead of photographic imagery. As usual I had been working on building up the layers of collage like a fossil. I was thinking how language is mutable like all organisms through time. It also has its own ‘DNA’ as some words are copied or transformed to all variations of degree across several languages, and are themselves ‘mutating’ in time in their form and meaning. I wanted the text to appear as a stenciled ad with its hard linear curves yet looking like a ghost of itself. My interest in fossils and archaeology has inspired me to be more interested in the destructive and ‘excavative’ possibilities of my process. 

Partly due to a period of boredom and frustration with working on this piece for many weeks, I started to rip out - through various methods - several layers of collage to reveal what’s underneath. The random and surprising conflation of imagery revealed on the surface from this process inspired me to ‘dig’ further. With the use of hand and machine tools, I also carved rough and straight lines, and gouged or tore into the collage layers. It was fun. 

One of my favorite and most challenging painting professors in college, Richard Reese, used to joke about my first series of paintings, which seemed to display a pained, hesitating use of the brush. One day, as he was studying the work, he just asked me, “Why are you painting at all? You seem more interested in the photos in your pieces. You don’t really like to paint.”  I was stunned. I immediately knew what he was saying was true. It was from that point on, I began making assemblages of found objects incorporating photos, collages, works with little or no paint. 

Over the last 7 or so years, I’ve reinvestigated the use of paint and the brush as well, because I love color and wanted to use it to amplify the work somehow. In ‘Soul’, I’m using paint to cover, blur or smear distinctions between images and layers. Paint is applied using sponges, fingers, and cloth. I suppose I’m not interested in using brushes at all. I like the random messiness of the the current method because I don’t want to illustrate anything intentionally as you would with a brush.

Self-proclaimed ‘anti-painting’ artists like Joan Miro and Brice Marden’s use of tree branches for brushes have always inspired me because of their strong belief in the idea of accident, randomness, and the unintentional as a valued resource towards discovery and excitement. Why did I use the word soul? It could have been any word really. The word echoed in my mind as I heard it repeated in conversation, news articles, social media, referencing the U.S. losing its soul, democratically or socioeconomically.

The current POTUS is perhaps one of the most divisive in history, weakening social and economic equality by advancing legislation and judicial appointees limiting voting access, repealing laws and institutions meant to preserve the environment, access to citizenship, higher education, healthcare for minorities. He has shown zero respect in his language and persona directed at women, people of color, LGBTQ, and the poor. 

The word ‘soul’, also refers to the absurdity notion of a ’corporate soul’ in this country. I’m reminded of conservatives referring to companies as being ‘people too’ during the global protests against Wall Street and multi-national conglomerates. The text is an empty space really - full of varied meanings yet void of context. It ended up looking like a fossil itself, in the excavative, destructive transformation of the piece. A fossil like a moment in time, transient and mysterious in its inability to tell all.