ABSTRACT ART WITH NEW MEDIA exhibition artist | NICOLEI GUPIT
In my art practice, abstraction has the ability to create connections across different cultures and peoples. For example, in place of representing the Filipinx body, I use the absence of the body to speak to Filipinx cultures broadly, which are not defined by observable physical traits but are characterized by affiliation and a shared sense of belonging.
As a multidisciplinary artist, I make work that speculates on diasporic futures by uncovering personal & collective histories, entangling our relationships to food and culture, and bridging connections through our shared sense of belonging. My body of work incorporates elements from two distinct but intimately tied cultures: Filipino and American cultures. I use plants and plant matter found in the Philippines such as banana leaves, cogon grass, and Philippine gampi to trace materials that originate from Filipino cultures. I also make paper pulp and resin casts of objects that trace back to memories of my diasporic family’s home. I combine, embed, reshape, reconfigure, and paint on objects and materials to express the cultural hybridity central to my cultural and ethnic identity. I draw upon my Filipino family heritage and my experience growing up in Los Angeles to speak on the social and colonial ties that connect many immigrant and diasporic communities around the globe. The mixture of low and high technologies in my work speaks to the contradictions that exist in formerly colonized regions in the world like the Philippines. As production continues to spread unevenly throughout the world, global capital and global labor come at odds with each other, leading to those contradictions: visible amalgamations of the past and the present. As a whole, my body of work telescopes from the personal to the global to draw attention to how immigrant and diasporic communities respond to the pressures placed on them by global capitalism.
