Organizer: Silverlens Galleries
Type/Location: In Person / New York, NY
Description:
Silverlens New York is pleased to present Fugitive Land opening October 24, 2024. A three-person exhibition organized by Christopher Y. Lew—founder of C/O: Curatorial Office, under whose auspices he has collaborated with Silverlens since 2023, consulting on the overall program and select exhibitions—Fugitive Land brings together works by Santiago Bose, Michael Joo, and Stephanie Syjuco. Through a range of strategies, this intergenerational group of artists examines aspects of history and place that have been obscured by power and empire.
Excerpt from After Empire by Christopher Y. Lew:
In his wide ranging 2019 book, How to Hide an Empire, historian Daniel Immerwahr charts how American imperialism eschewed past models of conquest and the US, instead, created a network of small-scale territories and military bases that dotted the globe, without a large colonial enterprise and primarily out of the eyes of its citizens. Certainly, the white settler land grab is very much part of US history, especially throughout the course of the 19th century when Indigenous land was brutally taken in the name of progress and westward expansion. So much of the violence, exploitation, and extralegal maneuverings of this period would serve as the foundation for an American version of empire—one in which so-called territories are a grey area in US law and, subsequently through advancements in communications and logistics technologies, those bases can be far from one another and no longer required traditional colonial structures to support them. In effect, most mainlanders had little knowledge of the very people that constituted the country in its entirety—that by 1940, 12.6% of the US population did not live in the contiguous states.
The works of Bose, Syjuco, and Joo demonstrate a series of refusals. Bose adeptly renders the tools of oppression inoperable, and by incorporating them into his art, he makes visible the apparatus of colonialism itself. Through deliberate deletion, Syjuco looks to the moving image and its systems of distribution to show how they reinforce nationalist fantasies. Joo’s sculpture is devoid of representation. Informed by the work of Bose and Syjuco, the work takes on an anti- colonialist stance, and through its very being it counters the idea of a landscape ripe for conquest and instead reinforces a notion of tectonic history, a timeline that extends forwards and backwards beyond any human timeframe and any kind of nationalistic mythmaking.
About the Artists:
Santiago Bose (b. 1949 - d. 2002, Baguio City, Philippines) was a mixed-media artist, educator, community organizer and art theorist. Co-founder of the Baguio Arts Guild, he is recognized as a pioneer in the use of indigenous materials. Often incorporating materials such as bamboo, found objects, and volcanic ash, his influential assemblages champion the resilience of indigenous cultures, like that of his home region of the Cordilleras. Drawing on deep criticality yet never lacking a sense of humor and wit, his body of work conveys the power of folk consciousness, religiosity, and the strength of traditional cultures in a society inundated with foreign influence.
Michael Joo (b. 1966, New York, USA) is a Korean-American artist who employs diverse media and materials, and draws together creative and scientific modes in innovative conceptual work that reflects on the intersection between technology, perception, and the natural environment. Joo’s materials are as diverse as his body of research, ranging from human sweat, silver nitrate, and bamboo.
Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Oakland, California) is known for her investigative, research-based practice encompassing photography, sculpture, and installation. Progressing from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations, her work employs open- source systems, shareware logic, and capital flows to scrutinize issues related to economies and empire. Initially exploring image-based processes and their implications in constructing racialized, exclusionary narratives of American history and citizenship, she has shifted her focus to the history- building and myth-making undertaken by Filipinos in their newfound independence. From critiquing images of American colonial anthropology in the Philippines, to investigating historical museum collections and shuttered newspaper archives, her projects attempt to reframe and “talk back” to the archive.
Registration Link:
To attend the event in person, please register here.