Lyra Garcellano’s solo exhibition, Heavy Lifting, presents a series of paintings which explore the intersections of colonialism, labor, gender, and the politics of representation. For her paintings, Garcellano references specific 19th and 20th-century photographs of Filipino women. Concentrating on photographs from this era, the artist examines the nation’s colonial history and how photography, a then-nascent technology of vision, served the interests of the ruling classes.

 

The photographs used by the artist all depict women carrying woven baskets, clay pots, flowers, and various wares on their heads. On the surface, this practice can be wholly attributed to the inaccessibility of more efficient methods of transporting objects. However, this obscures the role that colonial and imperialist powers have played, and continue to play, in forcing millions into poverty and keeping other areas around the world in a state of underdevelopment, hence the practice’s prevalence in the present age.

 

The timeframe selected by the artist covers the bloody transition from the Spanish to the American period, from the domination of an old colonial regime to that of a then-rising imperialist power. This period also encompasses the emergence of semifeudalism in the country—a ruthlessly exploitative system that persists to this day in which the centuries-old feudal mode of production is perpetuated and subsumed under imperialism (i.e. monopoly capitalism, chiefly that of the US). This serves as the context surrounding the materials that Garcellano had gathered—an atmosphere of struggle and bloodshed that, while not readily evident in the photographs, nonetheless permeates the images and is brought to the surface by the artist.

 

The exhibition seeks to demystify the aura of scientific objectivity that photography possesses. It highlights how the selected photographs did not simply and “neutrally” capture or reflect “reality” but also produced realities beneficial to the colonial forces by reinforcing colonizer-subaltern power relations. Photography was one among many tools utilized by our colonizers in propagating their ideology and asserting their cultural hegemony, all to facilitate the further extraction of our resources and oppression of our people and thus bolster their political and economic power. 

 

Garcellano highlights how these images—captured by Europeans/Americans, for European/American audiences—were directed by a colonial gaze, one that presents Filipino women not as humans with agency but as “backwards” and “primitive,” as both “savages” in need of “civilizing” and as “exotic” sights to behold. These identities, shaped by the racism and sexism of outsiders, were instilled in the local populace, which worked to pacify them and stifle dissent. So not only do the photographs gloss over the hard physical labor exerted daily by its subjects, romanticize poverty, and conceal the role of colonialism and imperialism in generating economic crises, but they help shape and strengthen perceptions of ourselves in ways that serve (neo)colonial sociopolitical and economic interests.

 

Through the act of painting, the artist mediates and reappropriates these photographs and subverts the hierarchies latent in them. Each painting presents the female figures as silhouettes bearing vibrantly colored floral designs against monochromatic environments. This is an attempt at bringing female colonial subjects—often relegated to the background, to blend into and become mere features in an idyllic, tropical scene—to the foreground and emphasizing their presence, existence, and labor. In Garcellano’s series of paintings, color and pattern are intended to symbolize layers of meaning and provide depth to the presentation of these figures, to revitalize them and give them a second life, in stark contrast to the frozen and passive states found in the original posed photographs.

 

Garcellano’s use of the idioms of decoration, ornament, and craft calls to mind the arguments made by artists Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff in “Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture” (1978). In the essay, they explore the prejudice against the decorative and a “disturbing belief system based on the moral superiority of the art of Western civilization” which relies on various constructed hierarchies: fine art above decorative art, Western art above non-Western art, and men’s art above women’s art. The authors note the machismo of various men in the history of modern art and their tendency to describe their art, if not as metaphorical weapons in contradistinction to decoration, as couched in terms with strong connotations of violence. Instead of omitting the violent so as to exalt the decorative, Garcellano retains this imposed contradiction and inverts it, privileging the exuberantly ornamented, colonized female laborer against a nebulous backdrop of colonial violence rendered in grisaille. 

 

The subject matter Garcellano chose for her works, while historical, remains relevant today as it illustrates an ongoing narrative not simply of “underdevelopment” but, as the late political scientist Michael Parenti argues, of “overexploitation”. Colonies and semi-colonies like the Philippines continue to be blocked by imperialist powers like the US from enacting genuine land reform and national industrialization so as to remain both as sources of cheap raw materials and labor-power and as dumping grounds for surplus commodities and capital. Indeed, within the global capitalist system, there would be no economic powerhouses like the US without colonies and semicolonies which they could exploit. Land is being converted away from the production of food and necessities towards various non-productive purposes designed to draw in foreign investments. Locals in tourist spots engage in self-exoticization and fuel the imperial imaginary to make ends meet, while indigenous communities are brutally displaced from their ancestral lands to make way for foreign mining projects.

 

Photography and other media technologies continue to be used to serve the sociopolitical and economic interests of the imperialist, comprador, and landlord classes. Heavy Lifting engages with this politics of visibility, encouraging a heightened sensitivity to the power of images and their capacity to (re)produce macho-feudal, colonial, and imperialist fantasies, and celebrates painting as a process of reconfiguring and materializing new visual forms and identities.

 

-Dominic Zinampan