Caroline Garcia

Visual Description: Caroline Garcia’s Queen of the Carabao is a 1-channel video with a split screen. The film opens with two images of the artist riding on top of a carabao through an open field. The screen on the left shows a bird’s eye view perspective of the scene from drone footage. The screen on the right shows the same scene at ground level. The video is filmed in slow motion. The artist wears a cream-colored top and blue jeans. The film transitions back and forth between this scene and a black screen with poetic text. The text takes the form of karaoke lyrics in which each letter gets illuminated slowly as if someone were singing along to them.

Curatorial Description: Caroline Garcia’s video work, Queen of the Carabao, is an ode to her Filipino heritage and an emotional investigation into diasporic longing. Drawing inspiration from the slow cinema movement, Garcia invokes the use of autopoetics and trance-like visuals to cross the emotional borders of returning to one’s homeland. In the video, the artist is shown riding in a field atop a carabao through her father’s ancestral lands. The video is interspersed with poetic text that takes the form of karaoke song lyrics—a popular pastime in the Philippines. The work’s slow and hypnotic tempo mirrors the artist’s feelings about returning to her homeland. Never arriving to a final destination, Garcia questions how one may connect to diasporic identity through ritual, repetition, movement, and language. 

Visual Description: This site-specific drawing appears on one window of the gallery. Drawn in black and white marker, the shape of a large butterfly is outlined across the glass. At the top of the butterfly is a crown with the letters “CKC” written on it. Inside the center of the butterfly is an eye-shaped oval with a QR code in the middle. By pointing a cellphone camera at the QR code an app opens onto the viewer’s phone. The first image in the app is a close-up of a logo that is written in silver chrome letters reading “Force Field.” The screen transitions to the visitor’s camera, showing a view of their location inside the gallery. Text slowly appears in the camera view and butterflies float across the letters. The text reveals a mantra which reads:

“We are braided souls that take ownership of ourselves.
We take space as we are, with no allegiance to man-made boundaries.
We are prepared to meet force with flow.
We strive to outmaneuver without guilt or shame.
We, in our power, meet you in yours; with our whole selves, with no apology.
We bend, not to break, but to dance with worthy opponents.
Our afterlives are unconditional and our souls transcend defeat.”

Curatorial Description: Force Field is a new augmented-reality based work, which activates a virtual Orasyon—a mantra/prayer recited before battle and training in Filipino Martial Arts. The Orasyon is activated through a QR code hand-drawn by the artist on the gallery’s window. The title, Force Field, reflects the desire to access ancestral ritualistic traditions as a means of protection and experimentation. The artist contemplates how this ritual may be used as a tool for survival and resistance against colonial violence.

Please access this work by scanning the QR code in the middle of the butterfly eye with your phone’s camera. Scan the black code in the daylight hours and the white during evening hours. Please download the app on your iOS or android device. If you are unable to scan or do not have a phone, ask the front desk for further assistance. Please ensure that sound is on to view the app.

Visual Description: This sculpture takes the form of a weapon-like object. The base is made of wood and has a silver arrow pointing out from the bottom and a black axe-like shape on the top. The top part of the weapon also has two horns. 

Curatorial Description: Tropical Dissent (Weapon No. 6) is the newest addition to Caroline Garcia’s ongoing sculptural series in which the artist creates weapon-like objects inspired by traditional Philippine Island armaments used in battle, agriculture, and ritual ceremony. The weapons are hybrid objects—rooted in both traditional and contemporary everyday materials such as glass bottles, metro cards, spears, and chains. Dissent is a critical point of entry into the conceptual meaning of the work. The sculpture blurs the lines between the fierce and the utilitarian, suggesting that connecting the two are necessary within the decolonial imagination. As Garcia builds this archive of tropical weapons, she reflects upon the ways artists may activate strategies of resistance through ritual practice. 

About

Caroline Garcia (b. 1988. Sydney, Australia) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She works across performance, video, and installation through a hybridized aesthetic of cross-cultural movement, embodied research, and new media. Caroline’s current body of work resists assimilation tactics across the transpacific through a critical engagement with violence. Citing a lineage of Guerrilleras from the Philippine Islands, she proposes unique renderings of survival strategies informed by elements of Indigenous Filipino culture and traditions rooted in ritual headhunting and martial arts. By initiating her own recuperation of violence, Caroline creates gateways for both self and collective actualization and preservation to engage with larger systemic themes of grief, immigration, and safety. Caroline is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow: Digital/Electronic Arts, a 2021 New York Artadia Awardee and has presented work at The Shed, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Creative Time Summit X, Lincoln Center, Smack Mellon, and The Sydney Opera House, among others.