Nicholas Grafia's first solo exhibition with Silverlens brings together painting, performance and live archive in a scenographically cued gallery. The title Comeback Kid. counters victimhood culture in an effort to annunciate the artist's ethic and practice of subverting systematic oppression through ambivalence, pleasure, kink, humour, trickery, magic, and more.
Through multi-perspectival visioning that reflects his ways of being and knowing, Grafia pluralities time, space, and identity. Queered and vignetted compositions stage uncanny meetings between historical, anonymous and alter ego figures as empowered shapeshifters.
With Comeback Kid., it's personal; as Grafia reveals the often disguised similarities between forced and voluntary migration and labor that is diasporic life, he teases out potentials of freedoms and belonging therein. We meet writer and activist James Baldwin, traveling and unnamed nurse heroes, a self-emancipated African American champion boxer, Indigenous peoples trying to escape encomiendas of the Spanish colony, the artist's mother and her childhood carabao – a beloved beast of burden and the the unofficial symbol of the Philippines. These painted and performed portals plot an auto-fictional and embodied aesthetics: multiple gazes, skin tones and genders – often within one figure, living within flamboyant colors and porous edgings.
As a singular noun, 'comeback kid' speaks of a resilient person who has sought and successfully found strategies to transform and overcome challenges. In imperative form, it signals relationality, becoming a phrase to hold the emotional ranges within plea and reprimand, love and longing, need and dependency. This being Grafia's first exhibition in his first home, Comeback Kid. poignantly connects in translation to the complexities of a Filipino nationalized identity known as Balikbayan. In Tagalog, bayan is country, balik is to come back.
Erin Gleeson
2263 Don Chino Roces Avenue Extension
Makati City
Manila, 1231
Philippines
www.silverlensgalleries.com
+63 2 88160044
+63 917 587 4011 (Fax)
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