‘The past is a foreign country’

Archivo 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.)

For a sustainable tomorrow

With goals of educating more Filipinos on the importance of sustainable consumption and supporting local farmers and fishermen, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Philippines, with the mission of “Transforming Lives,” held a benefit dinner dubbed “Sustainable Food, Sustainable Future.”

Proceeds of the benefit dinner will go to the WWF-Philippines’ efforts to secure food sources of the future, aid the livelihood of local farmers and fishermen, and promote eco-friendly means of food production and consumption.

Held at the Rizal Ballroom of Makati Shangri-La, Manila, the benefit dinner featured chefs Eric Weidmann of Sage, Nicco Santos of Hey Handsome, Chele Gonzalez of Gallery Vask, Patrick Go of Black Sheep, Sunshine Puey of Gourmandise, Miko Aspiras of The Workshop, Josh Boutwood of The Test Kitchen and Asia’s Best Female Chef of 2016 Margarita Forés of Grace Park.

Four pass-around canapés were served for the cocktails while the five-course dinner started with two crab dishes using Weidmann’s Northern Guimaras Strait blue crab with Smoked tanigue tartare followed by Santos’ Northern Guimaras Strait blue crab and Lemongrass salad on coconut-fermented santol crab cracker.

Then came Gonzalez and Go’s Yellowfin tuna belly with Szechuan and adlai, etag, seaweed and shiitake congee; and Forés and Boutwood’s Aleli’s (named after Daila Farm’s Aleli Crespo who sponsored the black pigs) pork loin, headcheese, sweet potato, Humba pineapple glaze and guava gel. Puey and Aspiras created the dessert of 64 percent Davao dark chocolate and over-ripe mangoes made with Auro chocolates. Wines were courtesy of co-presenter Bacchus.

Co-presenter Makati Shangri-La Manila showed its support for this WWF-Philippines fundraiser as it is aligned with the Shangri-La group’s “Rooted in Nature” philosophy and corporate social responsibility for a sustainable future in the Philippines. By 2020, the hotel group’s goal is to serve 75 percent more sustainably sourced food. *

(For more information, visit wwf.panda.org.)

(Follow me on Instagram @pepperteehankee.)

Certain photos by Pepper Teehankee on a Leica C Digital Camera