MITCH GARCIA

Matching Memories Between Cities

Mitch Garcia resumes her narrative in Retell / Retail, digging into old closets, recollections, and experiences connecting her artistic process across Manila and Baguio City. After a month-long residency in Santiago Bose’s house – producing art while archiving the contents of an old aparador and decluttering the surrounding studio space, Garcia found not only old photographs, Bose’s friends’ artworks, negatives and videos documenting the artist’s career. She also discovered a continuum between her own practice and Bose’s, as well as renewed inspiration and energy to sustain her own story. Garcia uses matchboxes, a material she has been fascinated with for some time now for this new chapter, and as Jose Tence Ruiz describes: The Philippine-made matchbox, which is both quaint and common, archaic yet still functional at its core for providing primitive but effective fire and heat, and for embodying the metaphor of a pixel, or a retail unit of any commodity that figures in the exchanges within systems of trade and negotiation. She parallels the ubiquitous matchbox with the phenomenon of image overload that now is standard on any broadband internet experience. She therefore takes the generic matchbox and repurposes it with any of thousands, if not millions, of random images from the internet, and fuses both into a tiny value added object which she tentatively labels as Retell-Retail. It is an act of making, of watching, of appropriating, of deciding, of transforming, of paralleling small retail units with the copyright evasive minute picture that brings her practice into the overlap of exhibition of objects and performative commitment.

Garcia creates five sets of matchbox libraries filled with found images from her residency, including archived photos, postcards and other correspondences. These libraries in turn now serve as repositories of documentation about a particular period in Philippine art, and relate to a specific person. Her Lost and Found Santi Files gives the public a glimpse into an artist’s life, chronicled and repurposed not only to provide information, but to signify a different level of intimacy and, literally, a means of keeping fires alive. In Cut Off Road, Garcia recounts a snippet of her Baguio residency experience, showing Bose’s house photoprinted on canvas with vehicles owned by Carlos Celdran and Kawayan de Guia superimposed on its surface. Codes and cryptic text flow across the canvas with dancing nymphs, an all-seeing eye, the Fireball devil, and a skull. Both homage and a celebration of artistic production, the piece translates authentic experiences on canvas, replete with symbolisms that pertain to actual people. Crazy in Manila is a recontextualized image from an Ermita magazine published in 1976, and serves to account the artist’s journey back to her own studio and her frame of mind as she comes to terms with separation anxiety. In portraying Jose Rizal submerged in flood waters that dominate the streets of Manila during the wet season and spent cigarette butts used to cope with the stress of living in her dangerous and densely populated home city, it is no surprise that she perceives Baguio as a place of productive hybernation with fingers rising out of the ground, a talampunay blossom and Burnham Park lake’s iconic swan boat. Garcia completes this chapter by an installation of Old Manila memes and aesthetics expounding on the linearity of the Manila art scene in the 1970s and the develepment of Baguio’s artistic community in the same time frame. As she acquaints the viewer to her residence, and then to where for her inspiration resides, she gathers elements she considers pivotal, drawing on consummated actualities, contributing to myth- making and using her works to substantiate legends in the always fascinating world of Philippine art.

Kaye O’Yek July 2017 - KAIDA CONTEMPORARY