The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

57 ARTISTS Hallow (installation view) 2015 Glazed digital backlit film / Installed dimensions variable / Courtesy: The artist and Blanc Gallery / Photograph: MM Yu Born 1978, Manila, the Philippines Lives and works in Baguio City, the Philippines Nona Garcia’s work probes the essence of things, setting up a dichotomy between the transparent and concealed, the framed and the natural, the sublime and the everyday. Her work is defined by its realism and how she sees the world, whether in her X-ray light boxes or via the vast surfaces of her virtuosic paintings. The use of the X-ray machine dates back to Garcia’s childhood. As a young girl with doctors for parents, she became familiar with hospitals and medical laboratories, and their equipment. X-rays were one of her first memories of viewing the everyday through a new lens; they allowed her to experience looking at the world differently, and to find the essence of objects. One of her early experiments was with her mother’s reliquary of saints, which she ran through an X-ray machine in the hospital where her parents worked. Paradoxically, this process resulted in images that were more mysterious than the figures themselves — bathed in luminescent blue light, with each nail and flaw made visible, the saints took on a new life. This experiment formed the basis of Recovery 2014, a work based on Cordilleran and indigenous artefacts from BenCab Museum, in Baguio City, and arranged as an installation in the symbolic form of a mountain. In Recurrent 2018, she X-rayed bones and coral, shown on a light box in the form of a seascape. In 2015, Garcia created a site-specific work for Blanc Gallery in Manila. Hallow 2015 used the gallery’s large windows as natural light boxes — recalling stained-glass cathedral windows — to exhibit a mandala design formed from the X-rayed bones of animals. Reconfigured for the glass facade of the Queensland Art Gallery’s Stanley Place entrance as a site-specific work, Hallow 2018 hovers between the celebratory and the macabre. White and luminescent against a dense black background, each X-ray of an animal bone is carefully and symmetrically placed to suggest flower and spiral motifs; it is only on closer inspection that they are revealed to be tiny parts of a spinal cord or a skull. Living corals are combined with the bones of animals — hyenas, camels, crocodiles, beavers, birds and deer — to reflect on the underlying presence of death in life. Garcia is also known for her meticulous paintings, reproduced in photographic detail with the same piercing gaze and desire to uncover that is found in her X-ray works. Born in Manila, Garcia relocated to mountainous and rural Baguio City, in Benguet Province, in 2013. At that time, she started responding to the overwhelming nature of the landscape by creating large-scale, photo-realist paintings of scenes around her new home. More recently, Garcia has been exploring the conventions of painting by working directly on wood or concrete. These paintings focus on the contrast between organic and manufactured forms and show her interest in texture, featuring items such as homemade wooden guns or tourist market curios from the artist’s own collection. 1 When a pine tree was cut down to make way for development on her street, Garcia arranged for the entire tree to be saved. For APT9, she has documented each dismembered branch with the detail usually devoted to the study of a scientific specimen. Refusing to either mourn or glorify, Nona Garcia opens our gaze to the unexpected beauty in the everyday, where the sacred and profane, and life and death are present everywhere. Abigail Bernal Endnote 1 The guns have frequently been interpreted as references to President Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’, but the artist maintains that this connection is coincidental, as she has been collecting the objects over a long period of time; Nona Garcia, interview with Abigail Bernal, Brisbane, 9 March 2018. NONA GARCIA