Hitherto V at Project Space Pilipinas
Distance and depth are always at the heart of Jill Paz’s art practice. Beyond her creative inquiry is this extensive desire to understand the expanse of which her personal history intimately collides and interrogates points of existence (and will) to be in a particular place in a particular time.
Known for her laser carvings of images on paper, wood, canvas, and cardboard boxes, Jill is an artist who carefully intricates technology with images culled from and imbued with history by utilizing commonplace materials to interweave lyrical memoirs from the personal to the historical and the universal. Perhaps one of the most notable works that best embody Jill’s continuing examination of the idea of distance is her 2015 piece titled “It’s a Journey Back that I’m always Taking” (Balikbayan Box), a sculptural piece that exhibits a superb sensitivity to the idea of place, of mobility, the medium that best signifies it, and it’s capacity to cultivate meanings akin to its context and associations.
Intended to portray "domesticity and diasporic intimacy," Jill’s video work "Caregiver" (Mothering from a Distance) is another potent study on the notion of distance as a means to attend to the sentimental, in-between relationships and attachments across time and geographies. Through a raw visual style reminiscent of multiple desktop windows playing moving images simultaneously, Jill plays again with fragmentation as a visual motif to record the performative exercise of "caregiving" through repetitions and layerings of routines, gestures, behaviors, actions, and movements, intertwined with the anonymity of characters and itinerant contexts. “Caregiver” is a packet of video clips rendered as multiple windows to the liminal, uniquely curated to be perceived distantly as a mise en scène, persisting to evoke the profound importance of vulnerability to give and accept care in some of the most challenging and yet transformative situations in our lives.
- essay from Project Space Pilipinas
