ARTISTS’ PROFILES

All images: courtesy of the Artist

Reflection on the Ascension, 2009, oil on canvas, 193 cm x 152.4 cm, (artwork for Beijing Art Fair, CIGE (China International Gallery Exposition) 2009), Solo Show Entitled:
“Home is the place that you will leave”

Marina Cruz
Redefining Nostalgia Flaudette May V. Datuin

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M
arian Pastor Roces rightly argued, in the companion
anthology of Text and Subtext (2000), the traveling
exhibit of Asian Women Artists launched in
Singapore, that in Philippine art of both colonial
and recent times, the Filipina still wears the cloak of nationhood—a
Philippine nationalism construed as continental, male and imperialist.
This pictorial sensibility, which Roces refers to as the Filipina’s
“costumed identity”, is distressingly naturalized in Philippine art
production; it is comfortably located in “an intellectual space beyond
interrogation,” even in those spaces described as “progressive”.
Regardless of time frame or period, dressing the Filipina as a symbol
of nationhood in art remained in the hands of men, but this image
was also reproduced by many women as well who looked upon
themselves, their country and countrymen, through the eyes of the
male, white colonizer, tourist and traveler.

The “baro’t saya (traditional costume approximately translated as clothes

and long dress) of the tribal, folk and/or peasant Filipina, the bikini bits of
cloth of the nightclub dancer, the loose-fitting “dasters” of poor women in
the cities and countrysides, the ‘uniforms’ of laborers and ‘maids’ tending
the homes of strangers in strange lands, and even the privileged Filipinas’
exquisite butterfly-sleeved ensembles of silk and embroidered pineapple
cloth, neatly—yet shakily— held in place with jewelry pins and clasps are
repeatedly worn by the Filipina in art as emblems of an unproblematic
identity. In whatever pose and clime, the emblematically clothed Filipina

Long installation shot: Laura-in-Absentia: Memories from a life of a school teacher Detail (casted dress): Laura-in-Absentia: Memories from a life of a school teacher
1970-71, 2007, installation, size variable, (for group show Tampu Lapuk) 1970-71, 2007, installation, size variable, (for group show Tampu Lapuk)

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Elisa in White, 2008, casted dress sculpture, reinforced fiberglass, 18.5 x 23 x 25 inches, from the group show Sentimental Value, Soka Art Centre, Beijing, 2008
is permanently dressed as “Culture”, wearing ornaments and clothes
of stereotypes and identities that transcend history. A Filipina identity is
worn as if it were an unproblematic given – a totality unencumbered by
complex, often contradictory, subjectivities formed through class, ethnicity,
sexual orientation, religion, and gender. Filipina artist, Marina Cruz’s body
of work – which is still maturing and fully developing – is already showing
the many Other ways of dressing the Filipina.
Marina Cruz has worked to re/dress this costumed anomaly by telling
another story sourced from family history that she (literally) excavated
from her grandmother’s closet. In the installation Laura-in-Absentia:
Memories from a life of a school teacher 1970-71 for the group show
Tampu Lapuk (2007), she talked about her aunt, a public school teacher
and her mother’s twin as offering another set of images of modern
Filipina identity. The work has three parts: a painting showing a class
demonstration, a sculpture cast from the original 1960s’ teachers uniform
(as worn by her aunt in the painting) and a video loop showing a class
picture, where the children’s faces alternately appear and disappear.
The painting, sculpture and video are viewed within a simulated
classroom, where viewers are made to sit on furniture appropriated
from the collection of the exhibit’s venue, the Museo Vicente that sits
on a university campus in Dumaguete, Central Philippines. Curator
Riel Hilario’s exhibit note informs us that “while the video shows the
transience of students’ lives (they eventually graduate) they are expected
to grow up into roles oftentimes defined by the kinds of chairs they sit on.
MarinaCruz highlights the museum’s role in edifying proper education—
which tangentially refers to the University [Foundation University,
where the museum is located] and the founder’s role as educator.” The
museum is based in the former house of Vicente Sinco, an educator and
former President of The University of the Philippines.
What I find striking in this installation however, is the sculpture cast of
the artist aunt’s dress and the act of supreme sacrifice she performed
in transforming a private treasured memento into a calcified object
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that casts in high relief a long line of strong women as teachers. In
her earliest project, Reified Memor— judged the Most Outstanding
Thesis of the University of the Philippines graduating Fine Arts class of
2003—the artist had also recovered another treasure: the baptismal
and infant dresses of her aunt Laura and her mother, Elisa, also a public
school teacher, and proceeded to make haunting high relief impressions
and sculptures out of them. Through these processes, she not only
preserved the dresses and captured every crease and crinkle but she
also distressed and petrified them. The dresses as casts are all copied
from a single ‘maternal’ line (or cast). The “original” actual dresses,
because of the artist’s intervention upon them, are now beyond
recovery, at least in their original state. However when shown together,
these multiples of the dress have yielded plural other ‘mothers’.
In another suite of award-winning works, the artist similarly made
copies of the dresses, but this time by photographing the old clothes of
the twins and two other sisters (Sonia, the nurse who worked in Libya
and married an English soldier; and Helen, the dentist who stayed and
raised her family in the ancestral home). She then printed these digital
images in high relief on canvas primed starkly black, thereby lending
the dresses a luminous glow. This surface was then embroidered with
figures, at times stitched in childlike motifs and in some parts with
faces rendered in appliqué. The artist worked first with oil paint but
then “painted” with needle and thread on this unyielding surface and
on top of a mere two-dimensional copy of the “original” cloth and
dress. For this work, the artist was awarded the prestigious Ateneo
Art Award and Philippine Art Award by Philip Morris in 2008 and the
series was shown both in her solo show Embroidered Landscapes and
the group show Sentimental Value held in SOKA Art Centre, Beijing.
Cruz’s actions, through this powerful combination of the repetitive and
labor-intensive medium of needlework traditionally associated with
“craft” and the domestic sphere and the cutting edge medium of digital
photography and its capacity to make many copies, re-collect, re/stitch
and re/dress the past and the maternal line, in contrast to the traditional
 Gregorio and Edilberta, 2009, wood and plexiglass, 37 cm x 24 cm x 12 cm and 45 cm x 36.6 cm x 16 cm
mediums of painting, print and sculpture traditionally associated
with male creativity and the public sphere. She lovingly yet also
ruthlessly summons and brings to life family memory, but only through
mementoes and their simulacrum. As the dress is now no longer a dress
that can be worn and caressed; it has been transformed into something
else and has acquired another reality, even though it retains some
traces of the “original” like a ghost that hovers and haunts.
In manifold and multi-layered ways, Marina Cruz’s work puts forward
Other ways of mobilizing craft, combining finery with hard-edged
calculation, creation and preservation with destruction or life with
death. This tension and un/ease is an important thread that runs through
her work, including and perhaps most especially, her paintings. In
Open House, one of her most recent solo shows (2008), the artist’s
work simulates the chaotic spaces and movement through her aunt’s
abandoned house in her hometown of Hagonoy, Bulacan (about two
hours north of Manila), where the artist now resides with her husband
and fellow artist, Rodel Tapaya. Composed in skewed perspectives that
juxtapose planes seemingly helter-skelter, these paintings capture an
interior space in disarray with household objects still intact but slowly
surrendering to the passage of time, almost holding their breath, pining
for their owners who are now elsewhere. The house itself sits in a
compound located very close to a river, whose tides shape the residents’
daily routines and their houses’ structures, which evolve according to
the river’s rhythms. When I visited the house I was warned that, as the
water level rises daily, to come “before lunch and be sure to be out of
here by early afternoon to avoid the high tide.” As the water level rises
almost annually, so the houses are built up layer by layer. To evade the
river’s floods, several inches are added to the floor each year: the ground
floors move closer to the upper floors; upper floor windows become
doors; and what used to be high ceilings are by now only a petite arm’s
length away. Thus, the overlapping perspectives, walls, wallflowers,
floors, doors, windows and ceilings in Marina Cruz’s paintings are not
only metaphorical, but literal representations. Past and present are woven
together in these interiors which are stacked up and transformed as a
result of the heaving of the river that runs through them.
Such overlapping realities in the artist’s works verge on the dark
and disturbing. In I used to sit here with my dog, a painting from
Recollections, another solo show in 2008, past, present and future
run into each other when a woman/young girl sits on a period chair,
amidst a slightly skewed interior background. The old woman morphs
into a young girl and vice-versa in this self-portrait of the artist, at once
reminiscing about the past and projecting into the future, with her dog,
the artist’s favorite pet, as a constant companion by her side. In Roots
of the Ancestral Tree, her grandmother Edilberta, the sturdy matriarch
who mothered four other mothers-teachers stands solitary and static,
weighed down and rooted in uneasy ground. Like a pillar from which
radiates several roots, she nourishes and lets the sun shine on the
many other routes she has cleared so that her descendants, including
the artist, can stake their own clearings in ways not available to the
costumed identities of her as well as her granddaughter’s time.
From the excavation of treasured mementoes to the calcified and printed
dresses of her mother and her sisters and on to the rooted image of
her family’s matriarch, Cruz speaks of women who raised families and
continue living through times and in conditions doubly trying for women.
In re-collecting and re-membering her matriarchal lineage, she not
only questions the stereotypes and totalizing identities of the Filipina
entrenched in Philippine art production; she also redefines nostalgia,
a motif that stands out in her works, not as a passive sentimental
remembering, but an active process of re/dressing, remaking and putting
forth “what could have been” in a less than perfect and livable world.
Flaudette May V. Datuin is associate Professor, Department of Art Studies,
University of the Philippines; co-founding editor of the digitial journal Ctrl+P;
curator and organizer of the exhibition trauma, interrupted (Cultural Center of the
Phillippines, Manila, 2007). She is author of Home Body Memory: Filipina artists in
the Visual arts, 19th century to the present (University of Phillippines Press, 2002)
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