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‘Revirescence’: Jill Paz Deconstructs Environmental Wonders in New Exhibit
Revirescence, the new exhibit at Artinformal Gallery by artist Jill Paz, exudes a modern-day spin of pastoral paintings that borders on worshipful. It doesn’t just showcase the trees and the flowers, but casts them in a light that transcends the physicality of nature.
Paz said that her studies at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts influenced some of the imagery she used. Located in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Eastern United States, she said that these surroundings grounded some of the work in the exhibit.
“That’s where I started to draw en plein air with some of my fellow artists,” she said. “And I think most of the works, because they started from there, a lot of the landscapes have that feel from Appalachia and the Blue Ridge Mountains.
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“So you see more of these evergreens and waterfalls that evoke nature from that part of the world, which is also where I grew up, being Canadian, American, and Filipina.”
Mixing Modern Methods and Traditional Influences
For Revirescence, the exhibition contains a mix of sketches, watercolor paintings, sculptures, and cardboard paintings. She showcases new types of artworks that she finds herself working with. The glazed stoneware sculptures are the newest, which she said she learned over the past three years from a family of ceramics artists at their studio in the United States.
The most eye-popping of these are the cardboard paintings, which are mostly enlarged versions of some of the sketches and paintings displayed in the exhibit.
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These cardboard paintings utilize a mix of laser engraving and cardboard from Balikbayan boxes that produce a specific texture. Paz layers different sections of cardboard on top of each other, creating a collage-like effect that resembles fragments of various photographs coming together to form a cohesive whole.
Methodology and Reasoning
Jill Paz’s process for enlarging images involves a meticulous methodology she developed for over more than a decade. First, she scans the image into a computer, then uses Photoshop and other software to enlarge it. She then executes her vision onto the cardboard with “a sort of Ben Day dot pattern” to bring the images to life.
“I was using my ancestors’ destroyed paintings—so paintings that were no longer in existence. And that’s why I started using this sort of Ben Day dot pattern because I was using photographs of destroyed works, photographs that are [of] a low or bad jpeg quality. A way for me to make it into a more visible composition was to use the Ben Day dot pattern,” she explained.
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The end product crafts a modern twist to picturesque images of nature. From a personal perspective, it gives off a very tangible and yet very unreal image—three-dimensional in flavor while still looking like a battered frame of a Filipino comic book. It’s a very unique combination, one that transposes nature without removing the artifice of art.
Nature in the Present and the Past
The work of Jill Paz for Revirescence concerns itself with the beauty of nature. She said that she was largely inspired by past movements like post-impressionism and romanticism in her subject matter and approach.
“Those art movements, they really evoke emotion in a painting or a sculpture, and they also have a sense of mysticism and spirituality,” she said. “And so those are, these are the subject matter, the sort of topics that I was approaching.”
That desire to depict the mystical divinity of the world around us extends beyond nature. The glazed stoneware sculptures showcase a person sitting down, their knees on level with their chest as they put their arms over it. It looks akin to indigenous statue designs, which Paz said she was inspired by.
“I was really interested in how anitu figures have this pose, this gesture, that’s both empowering and also at rest, and that’s what I was really interested in,” she explained. “The glazes for all the sculptures, which are hand modeled, [they’re] all homemade glazes.”
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In the end, Revirescence provides viewers with a deconstruction of our relationship with the glories of nature. Jill Paz adds touches like indigenous symbols or the use of the Balikbayan box as an additional dimension to how the ordinary Filipino experiences separation from nature, the artifice of the art explicit.
Photos by Elle Yap.
Related reading: ‘Nawawalang Paraiso’ Utilizes Concrete Works to Examine Modern Landscapes
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