I applied for a spot for an exhibition months ago. I requested it to be on March 1, 2024. I just wanted to be symbolic about it. The last time I had a one-person show was in May 2018 in UP Diliman’s Bulwagan ng Dangal, a few months before I embarked on this PhD journey. Years later, I wanted to have an exhibition here in the United States before I fly back. Plus, I did all of these works at a time of massive anxiety and uncertainty. I had to not lose my grip and thus went back to my first love which is drawing to keep my head above water.
I wanted to show how I inform my art practice with history. I have been so fascinated by archives and I think that if I want to understand the modern Philippines, I really had to dig deep into the archives here. I am at the point of integrating history in the art process. However, I do not do representation or mimicry in my art practice. I really like what Michel Rolph Trouillot wrote that “pastness is a position.” I thought about that because position would mean situated and not just merely symbolic.
As I went through archives, I realized that archives are violent diminishing of people and cultures. Archives are agents of clarity — but to whose clarity? And at what price? So, I have an exhibit entitled “Boondock Dreams.”
Here’s the exhibition essay
The word “Boondock” entered the colonial lexicon when American soldiers sought rebels from the late 1800s to the early 1900s Philippines. When American soldiers asked where the rebels or tulisanes are, Filipinos pointed to the jungle terrains of the mountains and replied “namundok,” which means “went up the mountains.” The Filipino word for mountain is “Bundok” which was then appropriated by the American industrial military complex as a location of danger, a point of distance from their notion of civilization. The “Bundok” is transposed to “Boondock” which is now considered the ghettos in American urban zoning. Yet, for Filipino resistance fighters, the “Bundok” is the haven away from carcel colonialism, a place to organize and agitate, a promise of resistance.
This art project gathers colonial photography for the artist to agitate it with his images of tropicality. This is not just to render the image into a different landscape, but to take back “Boondock” and reinscribe it as “Bundok” which can have connotations of hinterland and uncivilized. This is to twist the colonial power’s assertion of their version of civilization. Bundok becomes a methodology to take down the colonial mythmaking seeing the other as incapable and an inconvenience that needed tutelage. Bundok becomes an assertion as well as a means of tropical cluttering; the razed fields and mountains will always have regrowth. This regrowth is this redescribing and reinscribing of counter utterance and counter gazing. What the colonial powers tried to capture in their lens of authority and possession, this artist adds layers of images of changing the photograph itself, scribbled lines of whispered prayers and incantations of anger and strength, and visions of historical foment as disruptions of the very colonial image itself.
Relief Printmaking
The artist has been a member of the Association of Pinoy Printmakers since 2011. He has been an active participant in the group’s exhibitions. His chosen printmaking techniques are relief, drypoint, etching, serigraphy, and a hybrid of these.
2023
Relief Printmaking
20” x 20”
The call for entries cited Foucauldian Heterotopia as the core of this exhibition. Heterotopia (as opposed to utopia which means “no place”) complicates “space” as many meanings, many counterings, and many possibilities. For some time now, “nationalists” have been demanding a renaming of our country for we are named after a Spanish Monarch. These people think if we change the name of the country, we pry away the legacies of colonialism. Yet “country,” particularly “republic” and “modern-state” are not indigenous. Changing the name will not erase the colonialism that coalesced our existence. In the quest for nationalism, many rely on nostalgia of a pre-colonial purity as if it were a promised Eden in which we will return. People forget that the concept of “Eden” was foreign to us. The word “Paraiso” is borrowed. Can we have paradise if we do not have our word for it? In the insistence of a primordial Filipino, we erase our overlapping transoceanic identities. We are all islands. And the islands are of different identities. The pristine shores of our islands speak of our heteroptopic natures, changing like shoreline shifts from the tyranny and embrace of the waves.
What Colors Poetry
11”x17”, Offset Printing
2019
This is a paint-by-numbers work in which the colors depend on your association with memory, culture, and representation. The work is completed only with your interaction. The work becomes different according to your dictation. Interactivity is when the artist sets down a template and you take it to whatever direction you choose.
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this is my art piece at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. the exhibition for the Association of Pinoyprintmakers is entitled “Hands On” which hedges upon interactivity. of course, i cannot come home to be at the opening. i did the art here but had it mass produced via offset printing in Manila. this is a marked departure from what i usually do. this is not overtly political. i was also tasked to write the exhibition notes of the annual show of the Association of Pinoyprintmakers. both the work and the note were produced and inspired from Spring 2019 class of Alternative Ethnography under Prof. Lauren Griffith, PhD at Texas Tech University.
Photos and videos from Mars Bugaoan, Hershey Malinis, and Jun-Jun Sta. Ana
This work is 11” x 17” and was mass produced via offset printing
I am in good company here.
I requested a small table where participants can color my works
Participants are given a choice to take the work with them at home and finish coloring it there; or they could just leave it there. Part of the fun of “interactivity” is relinquish much control…which I am not used to admittedly.
Participants can just sit and contemplate of the colors they want to use. I bought and left a bunch of markers for them to do as they wish.
A child shows us a way to do it. Like I said, my work is not complete until the participants change it according to their “image” calibration.
Though initially I had intended that this work is for mature audiences because of the color selection mechanism asks a questions that may not be handled by children. But who knows, maybe they could?
I have read that the act of coloring or doodling can be beneficial for people. I hope my work at least gave them some mental space to declutter.
I was told that some people were already at work with my piece even before the official opening of the exhibition. Hey, the point here is to engage and play. So, thank you for taking time to engage with my work.
Of Fangs and Political Animals
Politics is a beastly thing. Political cartooning is either trying to pet or poke the animals. Much of cultural artefacts around the world integrate animals in the narratives as symbols of human aspiration (ie. fly like an eagle) or embodiments of malice and depravity (ie. treacherous snake). Animals become allegories for crucial lessons in fables as much as they are invoked as curses. Within this spectrum of narrative devices, the political cartoonist hosts a menagerie of animals to tackle issues at hand. This MFA exhibit simulates a freakish carnival wherein the powers that be are astride a carousel as they cavort from one impunity to the next. This is the MFA Exhibit of Jose Santos P. Ardivilla; whose kilometric name matches the title of his MFA Exhibit: “Kahayupan: A Bestiary of Political Animals as Visual Encapsulations in Large-Scale Political Cartoons that Represent the Administrations, Institutions that Enable Corruption and Impunity in the Philippines from 1978 to the Present.” The artist has been a political cartoonist since 1999. In his art form, he is an inheritor of symbols, a caretaker of animal imagery to be deployed at the behest of freedom of expression via exposing the idiocy that dogs democracy.
Taking on the Filipino word “Kahayupan” (to be an animal) is to incite both the beastly acts of others as well as the connotation of “debasement,” that we have become less than human and have been rendered as beasts. The MFA exhibits revolves around the notion that animals have been used as visual metaphors for commentary of society's ills. From the European Medieval Beastiaries, or bound text featuring stories teaching morality to the modern political cartoons of utilizing animal figures to liken either the brazen to the problematic, this MFA exhibit aims to produce a visual sequential narrative of presidential faults reminiscent of Christianity's Seven Deadly Sins. The seven presidents starting from the Marcoses reflect the duration of administration the proponent has lived and is living through to juxtapose the personal and the political. The proponent is a practicing political cartoonist, hence the MFA study shall be rendering magnification of comics strips-type of narration, wherein each panel holds a deadly sin and their causalities and implications. Though each panel is inherently separate and can stand alone, the MFA study aims to render these panels as a disturbing panorama of interconnected blighted political landscapes that we have gone and we are going through.
This is a zoo but we are inside the cages and we are their food. But here, we can defy the beasts’ impunity and abuse with mockery.
The art of political cartooning has been called “the ungentlemanly art” with good reason: it is in this platform that mockery has been elevated as a special skill. For centuries, generations of visual satirists have employed the political cartoon as an implement for commentary with jabs as sharp as knives. Many people in power, some of whom whose ego outweigh their own offices, are not keen on being questioned and being derided at the same time. But in a way, the political cartoonist is the child that readily points out that the emperor has no clothes. If anything, political cartoons are proof that laughter can be a weapon.
Remember, a hearty laugh shows off our fangs.
Exhibited at the University of the Philippines Diliman’s Bulwagan ng Dangal’s Atelyer Gallery from May 2, 2018 to June 30, 2018
Nga-Nga, Teh, Nangangateh (Open Wide, Girl, It Itches)
Installation at the Cultural Center of the Philippines
2013
The artist utilized the smoking areas with the glass panels to simulate a giant “aquarium,” related to the sex industry’s “aquarium” where the sex workers are positioned with numbers as clients pick from the other side. This enclosure of sex workers exemplifies the powerlessness of the “commodities” for selection by the patron/spectator. This installation work is in discussion with Ambie Abano’s work at the other atrium that purports Genesis; this work delves into the Book of Revelation’s Whore of Babylon. A lot of apocalyptic paintings throughout art history are of demons with mouths open receiving the damned and shall be consumed ergo the incorporation of the Tagalog word “nga-nga” or “open wide” in the title. The title is a play of sounds that lead to consumption and scratching that itch.
The artist appropriated photographs from the turn of the 20th century. These photos are from the collection of the American Dean Worcester in which he utilized photography to document the “new possessions” of America. Through this photo-documentation, the helplessness of the commodities is for the perusal and evaluation of those who acquired us.
The photos shall be digitally manipulated and printed in large format tarpaulin because this is the most cost-effective process. Then additional images shall be attached, or if you may, pressed onto the giclee print. The still and stern faces of women clad in formal Maria Clara shall be juxtaposed with images of collection and consumption like pestilence crawling all over their bodies.
The photos to be selected are portraits of Filipinas with considerable wealth; most of them looking sternly at the lens befitting the uneasiness of being encapsulated in a tableau for consumption. With magnification and seemingly put inside a box to which their states are amplified as well.
This work negotiates with the colonial pursuit of classification (via photography which is, in a way, printmaking, and deals with multiple editions) for consumption and post-colonial “bringing-to-the-surface” of views and implications that are deterrent to the actualization of a progressive identity. However, more than a satirical take on aquariums, socially-imposed female modesty/immobility, high-class aloofness and elevation, this work engages the viewer to ask “what is wrong with this picture?” Why think critically when you can just open wide and scratch that itch?
Details from "Should I Ever Get Shot:" hybrid prints using serigraphy, paper stencils, collage, with pen and ink on hand-bound compiled cardboards.
Papers and Layers Exhibition at the Cultural Center of the Philippines from Aug 27-Sept. 25, 2016.
Testaments of Endurance
Exhibition Note By Jose Santos P. Ardivilla
Paper for all its apparent and perceived weakness and disposability has endured through many of humanity’s technological and philosophical shifts. Paper manifested and propagated human knowledge and expression. The humble and sturdy paper has been a testament of endurance and versatility. In cartography, where lines are drawn and warfare erupts, paper played host to the shifting geographies in history. In recording the myriad trajectories of human progress and accomplishment and, on the other side, denigration and regression, paper bore witness to the unfolding and emerging histories such as to relay lessons for the future. In simpler and more personal aspects, paper is a vehicle for jotted down memories, frustrations in journals, and even scrawled prayers, which are heaped upon it to be folded and inserted into cracks.
However, paper never gets lost in the cracks, so to speak, even with the dangers of it being disposed of or ignored in the contemporary world. In the digital turn of communication, paper use is seen to be dwindling, a vestige of an old order. In the fickle and cynical art market, works on paper are seen as less valuable compared to artworks rendered on canvas, on wood, and other “sturdier” materials.
The members of the Association of Pinoyprintmakers (A/P) took to task not just to pay homage to the paper, but to prove the naysayers wrong. In the group exhibit entitled “Papers and Layers,” the printmakers prove that paper is not a bland, flat plane, but an object of fascination, reification, and reconfiguration. The printmaking tradition owes its very existence to paper. Yet, the participating printmakers do not focus on boring tradition. Instead, in their deft hands, they render paper as anything but beige and disposable.
The printmakers engage with paper for its structural capacity and challenge the notion of the material’s perceived impermanence. The “layers” invoked in the exhibit are added nuances and details that change the planar from a blank sheet into the depository of expressions, emotions, and even incantations. The act of printmaking literally adds layers of ink that is pressed on to paper to generate, mark, and transfer images.
In this exhibit, the “layers” are niftily deployed by the printmakers in their avenues of expressions, be it in current political skirmishes, or explorations of the body, the self. In the basic sense, the works on paper here are in many degrees like journal entries navigating through tense contemporary demands and upheavals. From representations of the body and place, to the pulsating abstractions that attempt to render time and emotion, paper is the paramount key to transmit such complexities.
In this exhibition, the notion of value and worth is not translated to shrill monetary entanglements for collectors, but is invoked by the printmakers’ adoration of the material paper. Not just its tactility of surface, thickness, or its weight, but the many possibilities one can play with in humble paper. This marks its very endurance, that it can still thrive and cannot be easily torn away from both esteemed and emergent artists. It is not the notion of its impermanence that should be taken into consideration, but how paper will always have prominence and, in many instances, preeminence in visual art.
Political Cartoons
the artist has been a political cartoonist for numerous publications. The artist occupies a position that not only is he a producer of images but is also within the academia who discusses, explores, and investigates on how these images come to be and contribute to visual culture. It has become a life study on how political cartoons, cartoonists, and symbols curate the images of nation and identity.
“Bakwit” (Evacuee)
12-page comics
2005
This 12-page comics entitled Ang Aking Kapitbahay: Kwento ng Isang Bakwit (My Neighbor: An Evacuee’s Story) was published in a textbook for Filipino Grades 4-6 students. This textbook entitled Peace Education Teaching Exemplars for Elementary Schools was published in partnership with the Philippine Department of Education, Commission on Human Rights, Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process,UNICEF with the assistance of the Australian Government. The textbook explores lessons on multiculturalism and tolerance. The 12-page comics deals with the rights of the child as constant, even if the child is an internally-displaced person.
