From the Beginning

2017 - Painting (Painting)
51 x 63 inches

From the Beginning by Rocky Cajigan consists of an assemblage painting, with accompanying sculptural objects presented on the floor. The image in the painting is based on a photograph, and the artist’s personal memory, of a Bontoc ancestral tomb, commonly located at close proximity to a family home. The painting is covered by a net material simulating a fence, creating a certain bodily distance from the viewer’s perspective. This barrier can be read, on one hand, as the symbolic threshold to the mortal world, and on the other hand, as a demarcation of individual territoriality and capitalisation of (ancestral) land. The artist has tied colourful threads of fabric to the fence, which he untangled from a souvenir textile woven by Igorot weavers for tourism demand. On the floor, fragments of Igorot basket-art, also made for tourists, but commonly used in the area due to its low cost, have been casted to a concrete base. In the Cordilleras, concrete is a construction material that is rapidly occupying the visual landscape, as it appears in the construction sites surrounding the tomb in the painting. This work presents layers of symbolic complexity and the possibility to translate the contextual specificities of Cajigan’s Indigenous and social background.

Rocky Cajigan is a Bontoc Igorot artist working in the contemporary contexts of Indigenous people from the Cordilleras region in the northern state of Luzon island in the Philippines. The artist’s practice, which includes found objects, assemblage, realist painting and archival-based installations, stems from a critical perspective on the cultural essentialism and minority politics in the country’s nationalistic instrumentalization of Indigenous people. Coming from a female lineage of Igorot weavers, Cajigan’s works are deeply connected to his psycho-biography and personal memory which he links to the inherited legacies of colonialism and cyclical neo-colonialism in the country’s continuing feudalization. With a criticality towards new realities shaped by the current state of globalization, there is also crudeness, nostalgia, and anger in Cajigan’s work; his unique image-making is often based in humour, irony, and queerness.

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