Speaking of ghosts: my upcoming show at the Open Studio at Governor's Island is uncannily titled "Possible Full Body Apparitions". This is a phrase borrowed from ghost hunting jargon and is commonly used to refer to visual experience of paranormal phenomena, and is a fancy way of saying "I probably saw a ghost".
I chose this title as an apt phrase that encapsulates my experiences during the past five months here in New York. Americans in general do not readily believe in ghosts and often think of paranormal experiences as signs of "craziness".
"Ghost hunting" has indeed become my byword, my peg, for a hunt for the experience of something inexplicable and inchoate due to its obsolescence, strangeness and beyond scientific or pragmatic reckoning. It also refers to facts, objects and people rendered as "ghosts" for the simple fact of their irrelevance to contemporary issues and struggles. They appear, often as haunting, or as involuntary memory of the past, or the origins and roots of the present.
I found that in expressing to artists and curators here of my interest in lineage and tradition in artistic practice I often get the response that I am "out of touch". When asked what I wanted to see in New York I reply with "traditional native American art, pre-modern sculpture and non-Western cultural practices allied to image-making" and this elicited the same response when I say "I would like to do ghost-hunting". Both are "far out", and seen as curious, strange and even exotic.
The process of making the works for "Possible Full Body Apparitions" began as an exercise of remembering and unearthing the concept of Philippine anitos, or ancestor guardian spirits, who are for all intents and purposes ghosts of deceased relatives invoked for help in everyday matters. Rather than being supplanted by Christianity, this attachment to the anito has been appropriated by the Spanish colonizers by assigning familial epithets to its own santos (Mama Mary, Papa Jesus etc) and by use of graven images that can be touched (and where physical contact to the object is paramount gesture of faith). Having been trained in the practice of santo-making, I have attempted several times to "go far back" and reclaim the anitos from possible forgetting, and to render their presence as full body apparitions in wood and in leather.
Yet the intention of reaching out and reclaiming the past is an act often not associated with New York, a city of forward-looking modernity. At first I found myself in a curious position in the politics of locality and I often took on ghost-hunting as a literal and figurative activity to articulate this off-tangent confrontation to contemporary art practice in New York.
Eventually my sculptural work expanded to form a built environment of an installation where I try to represent the locations in Lower Manhattan and elsewhere, where I thought I found and felt, either residual memories and history, reminders of my own lineage as a Filipino, and other ghosts and hauntings, that are actively being replaced, and rebuilt or repurposed. Aware that such paranormal claims will be in all likelihood dismissed, I take the ironic position of portraying these presences anyway. Even as ghosts do not appear on demand, they are not also as likely to move away or disappear just because we do not want them there or here. Ghosts are entities that are generally unwanted, treated as an intruder here. By affiliating my work with them, I affirm the possibilities of my intrusion, my un-wantedness: but like ghosts, I will appear as I please no matter what.
And like all apparitions, considering my brief sojourn, me and my work will also vanish.
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