Tropical Futures
Jill Paz’s mixed media paintings vividly portray lush tropical landscapes. Crafted with photography, painting, and laser-etching technology, Paz’s works are borne out of puncturing and etching delicate layers on cardboard. She uses balikbayan boxes as charged symbols of the diasporic experience. The term "balikbayan," meaning "one who returns home," holds significance as these humble cardboard boxes are intimately woven into the lives of Filipino migrants. Paz uses photographed and sketched palm trees as archetypal yet unstable signifiers of the exotic. She situates them within a tenuous grid, and her squares jostle with hesitation. Her palm trees are frozen in motion, provisional, situated between suggestion and statement.
“I was drawn to the tropical landscape for its symbol of paradise, and also for its symbol of an Imperialist bygone era. As the writer Nick Joaquin wrote, “The history of Manila can be put in two words: challenge and response. It seems as if every crisis arises just to prove the aliveness of this city; continually destroyed and continually rebuilt, ever decaying and ever re-greening.”
Jill Paz (Filipina-Canadian, b. 1982)
Born in the Philippines, Paz studied art in North America at the Columbus College of Art and Design, the University of British Columbia, and Parsons School of Design. She received her MFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design in 2015. Her work was exhibited in the Discoveries Sector at Art Basel Hong Kong by Silverlens Gallery in 2019. Her work has been included in numerous international exhibitions at Mizuma Gallery, Singapore (2021), Asia Now, Paris (2019), Vienna Contemporary, Vienna (2019), Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Bratislava (2019), Alte Feuerwache Lochwitz, Dresden (2016), Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus (2016), The Beeler Gallery at the Canzani Center, Columbus (2016), and The Project Space, Banff Centre Canada (2015). She lives and works in Manila.