Papers by Jan Christian Bernabe
Stephanie Syjuco ‘Blows Up’
Wasafiri, Sep 1, 2013
and asymmetrical shapes or ‘blobjects’ strip the objects of their original identities and values ... more and asymmetrical shapes or ‘blobjects’ strip the objects of their original identities and values in terms of consumer culture, transforming them into unknowns. The interplay of the two-dimensional images with the three-dimensional black sculptural surfaces captures her vision of ‘blowing up’ the flattening effects of globalisation within the context of visual production and reception in the digital age on multiple levels. That is, the speed at which images get produced and circulated has promoted a psychic detachment or desensitisation, a flattening of the images’ affective potential, due to their ubiquity in the globalised digital moment. The Black Market Series’s conceptual framework is created from the use of familiar objects, mediums and conventions. Figure 2. Stephanie Syjuco. Partial installation view of Black Market exhibition at James Harris Gallery, Seattle, WA. Pictured are two framed chromogenic lightjet prints, 15 in 20 in from the Black Market Series, 2005; digital images hung with ‘blobjects’. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA. 26 Stephanie Syjuco ‘Blows Up’ The Black Market Series
Sea, Land, Air and the Center for Art and Thought
Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 2017
Queer Camouflage as Survival, Presence, and Expressive Capital in the Postcolonial Artwork of Kiam Marcelo Junio
I present in this chapter a critique of a body of multidisciplinary artwork: a single-channel vid... more I present in this chapter a critique of a body of multidisciplinary artwork: a single-channel video piece "Art Must Be Beautiful (Study), After Abramović (1975)" and "Mimesis I" & "Mimesis II" from the "Camouflage as a Metaphor for Passing," a series all created by the Philippine-born and Chicago-based Kiam Marcelo Junio, a Filipino postcoloinal multidisciplinary artist. A former U.S. Navy corpsman for seven years before the abolishment of the U.S. anti-gay policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Junio appropriates the term and act of camouflage from “their” military experience as a tactical aesthetic strategy of subversion that manifests both corporeally and materially through Junio’s artistic practice. After his service in the Navy, they would attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). I use the plural term “their” throughout this chapter since Junio identifies both as a postcolonial gender-queer or gender-noncomforming individual and artist as well as through a performance of Junio’s drag “alter-ego” Jerry Blossom. Junio describes Jerry Blossom as “a gender-queer Filipino femme-presenting persona who hails from an alternate post-queer, post-colonialist utopia/universe in which the Philippines is a world power.”
JOHN EDMONDS heaster Gates has been thinking about monuments. "Young Lords and Their Traces," his... more JOHN EDMONDS heaster Gates has been thinking about monuments. "Young Lords and Their Traces," his new survey at New York's New Museum, is all about the way objects carry memories. It's a familiar theme in Gates's work, which often highlights the labor, craft, and life in reclaimed materials. The recent losses of some people who were important to him in different ways-like Gates's former organ teacher and friend Alvin's mother, Christine Carter, and his longtime colleague at the University of Chicago professor Robert Bird-were weighing on him. So Gates decided to turn the entire show-a collection of sculptures, clay vessels, paintings, repurposed items, and mixed-media works-into a memorial. In tribute to Carter, an organ is the focal point of an entire gallery, anked on either side by works made from oorboards taken from New York's Park Avenue Armory. Bird's expansive library of books on lm, art, Russian literature, modernism, and media theory is neatly arranged on a set of shelves in the middle of another. There are tar paintings inspired by the craft and discipline of Gates's late father, Theaster Gates Sr., who was a roofer, as well as the items and works of other artists, like a boot that belonged to the painter Sam Gilliam and a pair of sneakers from Virgil Abloh. Advertisement-Continue Reading Below The personal dimension of "Young Lords and Their Traces" is a reection of many facets of Gates's life in Chicago, where he was born and raised and continues to make his home and work. But in many ways it's less about losses than gains-how ideas, practices, friendships, relationships, and passions endure and are kept alive. "I used to think that monuments were about statues of old guys," Gates explains. "But when I was doing my master's thesis, I wrote about a synagogue on the West Side of Chicago that had been transformed into a Baptist church, a ea market, and a synagogue again over 80 years. The synagogue is a monument. It is a testament to the truth of many accumulated lives." Mariane Ibrahim in the office of her Chicago gallery with Patrick Eugène's Seasons Change (2021). Bar jacket, blouse, and pants, Dior. Ring, Cartier. JOHN EDMONDS Advertisement-Continue Reading Below Gates may well have been describing Chicago itself, a city with an extraordinarily rich cultural heritage. Chicago was home to a mid-20thcentury literary renaissance; an incubator for blues, jazz, and house music; the land of Archibald Motley and Richard Wright, of Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks. It was the birthplace of modern sociology and advertising, a locus of the Great Migration. It is a city that was razed by a re and rebuilt as a forest of skyscrapers. It is also one that has been shaped by Candida Alvarez at Monique Meloche gallery with Are you listening to this? (2022). Dress, Simone Rocha. Earrings, Ten Thousand Things.
Robert Diaz, Marissa Largo, and Fritz Pino (eds.), (2017) Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 376 pages, $34.95 (pbk) isbn: 9780810136519; $99.95 (hbk) isbn: 9780810136526; $34.95 (e-book) isbn: 9780810136533
Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas
Queer Reconfigurations: Bontoc Eulogy and Marlon Fuentes's Archive Imperative
positions, 2016
The article explores the archive imperative in the 1995 film Bontoc Eulogy by Filipino American p... more The article explores the archive imperative in the 1995 film Bontoc Eulogy by Filipino American photographer and filmmaker Marlon Fuentes. The archive imperative is a decolonizing aesthetic and political strategy that challenges American colonial visual regimes and knowledge production, particularly in the representations and legibility of Filipino bodies. Fuentes’s archive imperative encompasses the multivalent compositional and conceptual crossings that the filmmaker makes in his search for his “grandfather.” Close readings are performed on key moments of the film that draw attention to Fuentes as a postcolonial visual archivist and his film as a postcolonial archive. Fuentes produces queer composite bodies as embodied archives that reconfigure modes of knowledge production that visualizes Filipino bodies in the film as sites of nonnormative, counterarchival knowledge production.
Queer Reconfigurations: Bontoc Eulogy and Marlon Fuentes's Archive Imperative
positions, 2016
The article explores the archive imperative in the 1995 film Bontoc Eulogy by Filipino American p... more The article explores the archive imperative in the 1995 film Bontoc Eulogy by Filipino American photographer and filmmaker Marlon Fuentes. The archive imperative is a decolonizing aesthetic and political strategy that challenges American colonial visual regimes and knowledge production, particularly in the representations and legibility of Filipino bodies. Fuentes’s archive imperative encompasses the multivalent compositional and conceptual crossings that the filmmaker makes in his search for his “grandfather.” Close readings are performed on key moments of the film that draw attention to Fuentes as a postcolonial visual archivist and his film as a postcolonial archive. Fuentes produces queer composite bodies as embodied archives that reconfigure modes of knowledge production that visualizes Filipino bodies in the film as sites of nonnormative, counterarchival knowledge production.
Completing this dissertation would not have been possible were it not for the many people that ha... more Completing this dissertation would not have been possible were it not for the many people that have encouraged, supported, conversed, shared a moment for coffee or a martini, and offered their time to listen to me along the way. I would be completely remiss if I failed to acknowledge these wonderful people ("my personal cheer squad," as I like to think of them), who helped make this project a reality. They are every budding scholar's dream. The kernels of this project were planted during my undergraduate tenure at Bates College. At Bates, I am grateful to have worked with Lavina Shankar, my undergraduate thesis chair. She cheered me on at every step of the way, and continues to do so. Her mentoring and encouragement opened my eyes to the beauty of Asian American and Filipino American literature and its cultural and political possibilities. It was in Erica Rand's "Visualizing Race" art history class that I was introduced to Marlon Fuentes' Face Fusion series and where I first wrote about Fuentes' images. I would like to think that those early ideas about Marlon Fuentes and his work helped shape the first two chapters in this dissertation. To both professors, maraming salamat. My graduate education at the University of Michigan has been one of the most rigorous, enjoyable, challenging, and humbling experiences to date. The friends, mentors, and colleagues that I have met at U of M have all enriched my life in more ways than I can name. First and foremost, I want to thank Sarita See for guiding this project from start to finish, as well as being a constant presence from the very beginning of my graduate career. Her unwavering support of my decisions, however ! viii Pulusan family, Vallo family, Gonzales family, the Linao family, and the Quicho family, I give you my love and thanks for all your support, humor, and love. I am finally finished with school, I promise! Maraming salamat! And finally, this dissertation could not have been written without the love and support of Mark Nichols. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT iii LIST OF FIGURES xi
Queering Contemporary Asian American Art, 2017
The Filipino diasporic queer artist as killjoy, I argue, is critical subject position that the Fi... more The Filipino diasporic queer artist as killjoy, I argue, is critical subject position that the Filipino American artist Jeffrey Augustine Songco embodies and embraces in his artwork. It is through the negative, failed, or queer bodies that he inhabits and the affective oscillations or dissonances from the killing of joy that we, as viewers, might gauge the limits of heteronormative and homonormative sociality within the current neoliberal moment. The worlds that Songco creates as a Filipino diasporic queer killjoy artist allows for the production of alternative affective structures and social modalities. His attraction to and imaging of prisoners may even throw a much-needed wrench into the methodologies we use in our own intellectual labor. How might we understand Asian America through the use of negativity and failure as our critical lens?
Verge: Studies in Global Asias , 2017
“Filipinos work everywhere.” With those words, we launched the Center for Art and Thought’s inaug... more “Filipinos work everywhere.” With those words, we launched the Center for Art and Thought’s inaugural virtual exhibition Sea, Land, Air: Migration and Labor in summer 2013, and we established the curatorial and intellectual framework that guides all of our projects: a new kind of Philippine-centrism. As the curator, editor, and executive director of the Center for Art and Thought (CA+T), a web-based, nonprofit organization based in California, we take up this invitation from Verge to reflect on how and why CA+T takes the Philippines and Filipinos around the world as a point of departure—rather than a point of arrival—for bringing into focus and understanding other histories, spaces, and communities.
The Postcolonial World, 2016
I present in this chapter a critique of a body of multidisciplinary artwork: a single-channel vid... more I present in this chapter a critique of a body of multidisciplinary artwork: a single-channel video piece "Art Must Be Beautiful (Study), After Abramović (1975)" and "Mimesis I" & "Mimesis II" from the "Camouflage as a Metaphor for Passing," a series all created by the Philippine-born and Chicago-based Kiam Marcelo Junio, a Filipino postcoloinal multidisciplinary artist. A former U.S. Navy corpsman for seven years before the abolishment of the U.S. anti-gay policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Junio appropriates the term and act of camouflage from “their” military experience as a tactical aesthetic strategy of subversion that manifests both corporeally and materially through Junio’s artistic practice. After his service in the Navy, they would attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). I use the plural term “their” throughout this chapter since Junio identifies both as a postcolonial gender-queer or gender-noncomforming individual and artist as well as through a performance of Junio’s drag “alter-ego” Jerry Blossom. Junio describes Jerry Blossom as “a gender-queer Filipino femme-presenting persona who hails from an alternate post-queer, post-colonialist utopia/universe in which the Philippines is a world power.”
positions: asia critique, 2016
The article explores the archive imperative in the 1995 film Bontoc Eulogy by Filipino American p... more The article explores the archive imperative in the 1995 film Bontoc Eulogy by Filipino American photographer and filmmaker Marlon Fuentes. The archive imperative is a decolonizing aesthetic and political strategy that challenges American colonial visual regimes and knowledge production, particularly in the representations and legibility of Filipino bodies. Fuentes’s archive imperative encompasses the multivalent compositional and conceptual crossings that the filmmaker makes in his search for his “grandfather.” Close readings are performed on key moments of the film that draw attention to Fuentes as a postcolonial visual archivist and his film as a postcolonial archive. Fuentes produces queer composite bodies as embodied archives that reconfigure modes of knowledge production that visualizes Filipino bodies in the film as sites of nonnormative, counterarchival knowledge production.
Wasafiri: International Contemporary Writing, 2013
I examine the politics and poetics of Stephanie Syjuco’s interstitial interventions–cultural and ... more I examine the politics and poetics of Stephanie Syjuco’s interstitial interventions–cultural and political challenges produced from a diasporic positioning—in the “Black Market Series” (2005). The “Black Market Series” is a series of digital prints composed of nine images found on the Internet that Syjuco has digitally redacted. In a few of the prints, the uneven contours of the redactions intimate the speed at which Syjuco has erased the objects within the frames, while in others these black redactions have monopolised large areas that leave only the human figures visible. When exhibited the digital prints are displayed alongside asymmetrically-shaped black sculptural objects that Syjuco calls ‘blobjects.”
Syjuco’s artwork offers an opportunity to explore Filipino bodies within spaces and moments of capitalist production, distribution, and consumption from a Filipino diasporic and artistic vantage point, which is also guided by a feminist imperative. Syjuco’s work speaks to the political possibilities of an aesthetics shaped by and from the interstices.
Exhibition Catalog Essays by Jan Christian Bernabe
All We Want Is to See Ourselves, 2019
This essay is part of an exhibition catalog for the group show "All We Want Is to See Ourselves" ... more This essay is part of an exhibition catalog for the group show "All We Want Is to See Ourselves" of seven Filipinx diasporic artists creating abstract artworks. The essay explores questions about the types of ethical frameworks that are needed to disrupt the predictability of the art industrial complex and their over-reliance on figurative work over abstract work by artists of color. The stakes to claim artists of color is often tied to the kinds of works that convey realist depictions of them or their communities. Yet abstract art also addresses issues of lived realities and should not be dismissed so readily. The seven artists in the exhibition demonstrate the importance of abstraction in capturing their intersectional identities.
Out of the Archives: Process and Progress, 2009
The paintings of John Yoyogi Fortes and the act of producing them by the artist, I argue, perform... more The paintings of John Yoyogi Fortes and the act of producing them by the artist, I argue, perform counterarchival work. They respond to the material and epistemic constraints produced by US empire. Fortes's work upends dominant representations of Filipino bodies found with the archives of American empire and beckons viewers to think about the agency of Filipino diasporic artists to create new and multidimensional representations of Filipinos.
Filipino American Artist Directory, 2018
This experimental essay on the Indiana-based, Filipino American gay photographer Kelvin Burzon re... more This experimental essay on the Indiana-based, Filipino American gay photographer Kelvin Burzon reflects on the location of the Midwest, specifically Indiana, and its influence on Burzon's photographic practice. His works are dominated by questions of being Filipino American and gay in a landscape and cultures (American and Filipino) that continue to place psychic and material constraints on his body and his art practice. The essay specifically addresses his latest series "Noli Me Tángere" (2015-2016), a reference to the Philippine nationalist José Rizal's novel of the same name that roughly translates to "Touch Me Not." In the photographic series, Burzon finds resonance in Rizal's revolutionary novel and its politics of exposing the social ills produced by Spanish Colonialism by contextualizing the framework of exposure to the contemporary moment. In a time of anti-gay sentiment, spurred on by the Republican administration, and the former governor of Indiana, Mike Pence, and the Catholic church's refusal to embrace LGBTQ communities, Burzon pulls from Catholic religious iconography to produce queer portrayals of biblical references, sometimes producing new queer characters staged to resemble biblical figures. His portraits produce an intentional queer community within the heart of the Midwest by using queer subjects located in Indiana in his photographs, disrupting current anti-gay narratives within national and Filipino diasporic spaces. Burzon's "Noli Me Tángere" is a postcolonial, revolutionary act of queer community building through a deployment of photographic exposure.
Exhibition catalog essay for group show "Techniques: Contemporary Asian American Time-Based Art —... more Exhibition catalog essay for group show "Techniques: Contemporary Asian American Time-Based Art — Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik, Kat Larson, and Gina Osterloh" at the Sheehan Gallery, Whitman College (2011)
Exhibition catalogue essay for Filipino American photographer and filmmaker Gina Osterloh's solo ... more Exhibition catalogue essay for Filipino American photographer and filmmaker Gina Osterloh's solo show "Nothing to See Here There Never Was" (2015).
Book Reviews by Jan Christian Bernabe
Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 2019
Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries offers queer diasporic Filipinx an... more Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries offers queer diasporic Filipinx and intersectional interventions that should have a resound- ing impact on studies of Filipino art in the Americas. Notably, the work shifts the focus of queer diasporic Filipinx visual and performance art studies outside the United States-Philippine binary. In doing so, the book brings attention to what the editors call “new queer geographies of queer of color” (xviii). While scholarship on Asian American art—and in particular Filipino American art and visual culture—has seen an efflorescence of attention in the last decade, Diasporic Intimacies breaks the US-Philippine centrism of these studies as it introduces readers to Canadian artists and scholars. The editors, all of whom work as scholars and as members of the queer Filipinx Canadian art and activist communities in Toronto, deserve praise for the intellectual scope and trajectory of the book.
International Review of African American Art Plus, 2012
Book Review: "'In the Eyes of the Muses: Selections from the Clark Atlanta University Art Collect... more Book Review: "'In the Eyes of the Muses: Selections from the Clark Atlanta University Art Collections" (2012)
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Papers by Jan Christian Bernabe
Syjuco’s artwork offers an opportunity to explore Filipino bodies within spaces and moments of capitalist production, distribution, and consumption from a Filipino diasporic and artistic vantage point, which is also guided by a feminist imperative. Syjuco’s work speaks to the political possibilities of an aesthetics shaped by and from the interstices.
Exhibition Catalog Essays by Jan Christian Bernabe
Book Reviews by Jan Christian Bernabe