Images courtesy of Silverlens Gallery
Wawi Navarroza considers herself as an artist who uses photography to explore her art practice. Her current exhibition, As Wild As We Come (until April 5, 2023, Silverlens Galleries) was first exhibited in London last year, and at the recently-held Art Fair Philippines 2023.
Known for self-portraits stylized in tableau-vivant or “living picture,” Navarroza is director, photographer, actor, and editor who takes care of the nitty-gritty, the setting, costumes, props, lighting, and all.
Created in-studio with intricate staged settings, the self-portraits are constructed images, constructed reality and not photography, in the conventional sense. Through lighting, the images are rendered flat like a collage. Intentionally, the “visual anomalies” such as cuttings and repetition and digital cuts-and-pastes are visible in selected places, and never hidden as Navarroza notes, “it’s there to remind you that you’re looking at my opinions, at how I see the world.”
Through self-portraits, Navarroza explores the infinite permutations of self and identity, sense of place and belonging that are all embedded in her experiences as a Filipino. They mark specific events in her life, of natural disasters, loss and destruction, disease and sickness, motherhood, rebirth and renewal, and life must go on. Largely autobiographical, they are also her way of reaffirming a life lived, through wins and losses, and remaining true to the self.
Defiantly wild
Referencing the Western stereotype of “wild”— the barbarians and savages of the unknown and mysterious Orient— the artist reclaims the word as an expression of defiance. Yes, we are wild and we will prevail.
This new body of work, all done in 2022 in Istanbul where the artist has resided since 2019, marks a life-changing milestone in the artist’s life and practice, from moving countries, giving birth, and becoming a mother. It is a celebratory rebirth for Navarroza, as an artist, a woman, and a mother.
Amplify women’s voices
This latest collection continues Navarroza’s “vivid and layered explorations into identity, place, belonging with a specific focus on the female experience, rebirth and transformation.”
The self-portraits “amplify women’s voices and interior worlds,” in her own words. They belong “to each woman who has in her first order of desire is to create.”
In Mouth of Pearls/Oryental & Overseas (Self-Portrait), the artist references the OFWs who have made the uncertain journey overseas to support their families left behind. Sending a balikbayan box is a gesture of love, a replacement for the physical presence of a mother, and yet, society pays a steep psychosocial price, sooner or later.
In Portals/Double Portraits (Self Portraits) with her two-year-old son, the work portrays the before and after of motherhood, marking the journey of a new mother who will be a mother forever, like millions of women across time and space.
Inspired by Hidilyn Diaz, the first Filipino to win an Olympic gold medal, in The Weightlifter Orans/Auit at Gaua, Self-Portrait with Blue Ribbon, the artist makes the prayer pose of orans, like Hidilyn’s in her weightlifting victory, and a win for all Filipino women to persist in their dreams.
Navarroza also thinks about all those quiet women in her work, “who can’t put themselves in front and lend their voices. I want to give power to that.”
Texture, patterns, and color remain an intrinsic part of her artmaking, seen in the use of textiles and draperies with vibrant colors and patterns in stripes, checkered, polka dots, commercial and handwoven, to denote the burst of life itself, amidst layers of diverse objects such as a broom, coconuts, artificial tropical flowers, fruit and vegetables, vases, potted plants, foliage of leaves, and more.
“Tropical Gothic”
While self-portraits have recurred in her body of work for over twenty years, the exhibition Self-Portraits and Tropical Gothic in 2019 was Navarroza’s first exhibition that focused on the form itself.
Drawing inspiration from Nick Joaquin’s literary imagery of the “Tropical Gothic” where layers of history, culture and influences from Spain, America, Hollywood, folk, animism, and Catholic, pop culture, melodrama, fiestas and processions, faith and profanity all collide and fuse into what Filipinos have become today and are becoming tomorrow.
Wawi Navarozza
A graduate of communication arts from De La Salle University, Manila and did further studies at the International Center for Photography in New York with a grant from the Asian Cultural Council. She finished her Master’s in Contemporary Photography at the Instituto Europeo di Design in Madrid.
Navarroza has received a number of awards such as the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship Grant New York, Lucas Artists Fellowship Award for Visual Arts San Francisco, Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Awards, Ateneo Art Awards, Lumi Photographic Art Awards Helsinski, and a finalist for Singapore Museum Signature Art Prize, WMA Commission Hongkong, and Sovereign Asian Art Prize.