Marigold Santos: binhi at buhol

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Marigold Santos, 2020

Marigold Santos: binhi at buhol 

Exhibition Open & Online Viewing Room 

Jarvis Hall Gallery is delighted to present binhi at buhol, a new body of work by Filipinx-Canadian artist Marigold Santos. The exhibition’s title is written in Tagalog/Filipino, offering an access point rooted in language, a foundational aspect of identity that Santos is reclaiming since immigrated to Canada with her family as a child. binhi at buhol translates as “seeds and knots” connoting both growth and binding or constriction. The title imparts a position to speak to nuance within the exhibition providing a compelling place for the viewer to explore how Santos translates her experience of diaspora and fractured identity as a Filipinx-Canadian woman.

binhi at buhol features new paintings by Santos as well as pieces related to her tattoo practice. In her paintings, drawings and ceramics Santos explores her feelings of a hybrid identity through a mythological creature from the folklore of the Phillippines. The asuang embodies multiplicity in its many representations: a shape-shifting vampire; a witch; undefined and undefinable in gender, age and other Western paradigms of identity; and most intriguing, is its ability to split or divide itself in half and reassemble again, shifting from human-like forms to florae and back again. This power manifests as adaptability, resilience, survival and growth. In clarity of slow awakening, unveiling (2020) presents a landscape reminiscent of the Alberta badlands. The geography the artist depicts questions place as home and where that may be. Stratification of the land also references the complexity and deep layers of identity that Santos examines across her oeuvre. In this piece, the asuang appears as “shrouds”: rounded, amorphous and unidentifiable shapes. The shrouds blend with the land seamlessly connecting the asuang with the natural world.

In other paintings, the asuang appears as specific florae such as the yucca plant or travellers palm. Santos also employs an evolved form of the asuang in works that feature disembodied parts of the creature. In fluid shroud (rosal in strata) (2020) a black form floats in the middle of the canvas. It appears to ooze and spill wax-like. The form takes shape in tendril-like fingers from which emerge new life in the form of white blossoms; the gardenia, a flower with a captivating fragrance of which Santos holds a deep sensorial body memory of her Filipinx heritage. Rendered in the artist’s familiar inky palette of black and shades of grey, the landscapes blend imagined and real places. The backgrounds are painted in pastel hues of yellows, pinks, purples, greens and indigo, becoming spaces that are unplaceable and unfixed in linear time.

In binhi at buhol Marigold Santos weaves the enduring essence of personal empowerment, resilience and joy into the once fearsome folkloric creature of the asuang. Through the evolution of this once terrifying creature, Santos is able to translate the complicated experience of loss, grief and rebirth that accompanies living as an immigrant in diaspora. As the asuang travels through her canvases sprouting flowers that haunt with deep memories of scent, imagined and real places brought together as dreamscapes and the mythic divided yet united figure, the viewer is invited to explore the fragmented experience of immigration and one way that lived existence can be navigated.

~ Maeve Hanna / Art Writer

Marigold Santos was born in the Philippines, and immigrated with her family to Canada in 1988. She pursues an inter-disciplinary art practice that examines lived experience and storytelling, presented within the otherworldly. Her work explores self-hood and identity that embraces multiplicity, fragmentation and empowerment, as informed by experiences of movement and migration. She holds a BFA from the University of Calgary, an MFA from Concordia University, and is a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec. Recent exhibitions include MALAGINTO at the Montreal Arts Interculturels (Montreal, 2019), SURFACE TETHER at the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton, 2019), MALAGINTO at the Dunlop Gallery (Regina, 2019), and Relations: Painting and Diaspora at Fondation Phi (Montreal, 2020). This past year, Marigold was one of the five finalists awarded the 2020 MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award.