ARTIST STATEMENT | 2010 |
“In 1898, when the United States took over from Spain as the Philippines’ colonial masters, we managed a voyage to the NEW WORLD without having to leave tropical waters. We became inmates of Hollywood; felt the pulse of the mighty automobile beneath our feet; inspected the NEW WORLD species in the form of Yankee administrators as closely as they inspected us…we know all about America before we came.”
Luis H. Francia for the 1995 art exhibition catalogue “Memories of Overdevelopment.”
The past is a foreign country and my favorite television show. I was born in Hollywood California, the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, which was also the city my family immigrated to in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In my artwork, television and films intermingle with personal memory, and social history. My mother becomes a starlet, grandfather the protagonist, and I the antagonist, co-star, and time traveler. I make videos, digital montages, installations, and sculptures that appropriate a family archive of cinema-inspired portraits that were taken by my grandfather and my mother when they first arrived in Tinseltown.
Technology plays an integral part in all of my work. By addressing it, I allude to a time that has passed, time that is passing, and a time that has been constructed. Temporality is in the formal issues of my work; the possibility of light bulbs burning out, dropping frames indicating the end of a super 8 film roll, and making apparent found images that reference a particular historical time frame. Sitting in between criticality and one of naiveté, idealism, and romance, I interrogate the space of these photographs to pose personal, social, and political questions relating to American culture, identity, and immigration.
A majority of my work is based on photographs taken when my family first immigrated to the US from the Philippines in 1969 and 1972, a time of cultural upheaval and redefinition. Because of this revolution just a few years prior, my family was able to define their own identities in the context of Hollywood, Disneyland, and Kodak. By recontextualizing the small snapshots into large format photographs, montages, sculpture, and video installations, I can articulate my relationship with these images that are both problematic and surreal.
Luis H. Francia for the 1995 art exhibition catalogue “Memories of Overdevelopment.”
The past is a foreign country and my favorite television show. I was born in Hollywood California, the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, which was also the city my family immigrated to in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In my artwork, television and films intermingle with personal memory, and social history. My mother becomes a starlet, grandfather the protagonist, and I the antagonist, co-star, and time traveler. I make videos, digital montages, installations, and sculptures that appropriate a family archive of cinema-inspired portraits that were taken by my grandfather and my mother when they first arrived in Tinseltown.
Technology plays an integral part in all of my work. By addressing it, I allude to a time that has passed, time that is passing, and a time that has been constructed. Temporality is in the formal issues of my work; the possibility of light bulbs burning out, dropping frames indicating the end of a super 8 film roll, and making apparent found images that reference a particular historical time frame. Sitting in between criticality and one of naiveté, idealism, and romance, I interrogate the space of these photographs to pose personal, social, and political questions relating to American culture, identity, and immigration.
A majority of my work is based on photographs taken when my family first immigrated to the US from the Philippines in 1969 and 1972, a time of cultural upheaval and redefinition. Because of this revolution just a few years prior, my family was able to define their own identities in the context of Hollywood, Disneyland, and Kodak. By recontextualizing the small snapshots into large format photographs, montages, sculpture, and video installations, I can articulate my relationship with these images that are both problematic and surreal.
