Skins
Photo by Patrick Cruz
Main Gallery Area Artist
Artist Information
Patrick Cruz
1987 Born in Manila
2016 Graduated from University of Guelph, Masters of Fine Arts
2018 “Surrender to Mastery”, Regart (Quebec,Canada)
2018 “labas vs loob (inside vs outside)”, Mono8 Gallery (Manila,Philippines)
2018 “By What Signs Will I Come To Understand”, Franz Kaka (Toronto,Canada)
2019 “people without property”, Mo_space (Manila,Philippines)
2019 “Words Bounce”, Nanaimo Art Gallery (British Columbia,Canada)
My experience migrating from the Philippines to Canada informs my studio practice, prompting me to question notions of diaspora, displacement and the adoption of a new cultural identity. Our increasingly globalized experience suggests a sense of cultural hybridity coalescing in a state of homogeneity. This provocation has led me to use aesthetic strategies that adopt folk and pre-colonial sensibilities, such as ornamentation and magical thinking as a form of inquiry to decolonize hegemonic ideologies.
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Independent Curator
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As National Winner of the 17th Annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2015, the most prestigious award for emerging Canadian painters, Patrick Cruz is one of Canada’s most noteworthy artists today. Cruz creates colorful paintings overflowing with a sense of speed, revealing inspirations from cave paintings and alchemy, hieroglyphics, and the chaotic crowds of Manila, Philippines, his birthplace. He also creates extreme installations comprising of a huge number of sculptures that cover entire walls and floors up to the ceiling. Based on his experience of moving from Manila to Canada at the age of 18, he holds an original style of expressing his wavering personal identity between the two cultures. The physicality and time of these continuously moving diaspora and the mixing of globalization and culture are shown through collages of paintings collected in excess that overturn the concept of painting in their bursting energy.