Nona Garcia
APT9
Born 1978 Manila, the Philippines
Lives and works in Baguio City, the Philippines
Nona Garcia probes into the essence of things, setting up a dichotomy between the transparent and concealed, framed and natural, the sublime and the everyday. In 2013, she relocated to mountainous Baguio City in Benguet Province. Since then she has responded to the immediacy of this landscape, creating large-scale, highly realistic paintings of scenes viewed in and around her new home. Garcia’s X-ray works are another key aspect of her practice. Focusing on Cordilleran and indigenous artefacts, reliquaries of saints, or delicate animal bones designed in the form of a mandala, she has created installations using lightboxes as well as window-based works. Paradoxically, the process of exposure results in images that are more mysterious — bathed in luminescent blue light, each flaw made visible, the bones and objects take on a new life.
Nona Garcia has also worked with the QAGOMA Children's Art Centre to develop a project for APT9 Kids.
Nona Garcia / The Philippines b. 1978 / Hallow 2015 (detail) / Glazed digital backlit film / © Nona Garcia / Installation view, Blanc Gallery Manila. Courtesy the artist and Blanc Gallery / Photograph: © MM Yu
Nona Garcia’s use of the X-ray machine has its origins in her childhood. Her parents were doctors, and as a young girl, she became familiar with hospitals and medical laboratories, and their equipment. X-rays were one of her first memories of viewing the everyday through a new lens; they allowed her to experience looking at the world differently, and to explore the hidden nature of objects. Paradoxically, the objects she X-rays often become more mysterious, taking on a new life and creating a dichotomy between the transparent and the mystical, the sublime and the everyday.
Garcia’s Hallow 2018 hovers between the celebratory and the macabre. The Gallery’s large windows become natural light boxes — recalling stained-glass cathedral windows — hosting a mandala formed from the X-rayed bones of animals. White and luminescent against a dense black background, the intricate symmetrical designs suggest flower and spiral motifs; it is only on closer inspection that the elements are revealed to be tiny parts of a spinal cord or a skull. Living corals are combined with the bones of animals — hyenas, camels, crocodiles, beavers, birds and deer — in an enigmatic reflection on the underlying presence of death in life.