From desolate landscapes, portraits of people with their backs turned to the viewer or X-rays of sacred relics, the stark realism of Nona Garcia’s paintings and works are shaped by an abiding concern to make visible the unseen and to redirect attention to the invisible, oftentimes by engendering a confrontation with the seemingly banal, mundane or hidden. Unearth emerges as a result of Garcia’s recent relocation away from metropolitan Manila to the city of Baguio, in the Philippine Cordilleras mountain region, and her immersion in a new physical and cultural environment. Executed with a mimetic realism to rival a photograph, the painting Unearth depicts a landscape or scene that is ubiquitous to Baguio: the image of the hillytop colonized by shanty housing. The vista is compositionally dominated by a stunning vast expense of sky – a near-impossible sight in Manila – but even so, nature here is hardly wild or beautiful, for the heft of human presence is evident with the density of the makeshift housing precariously perched on the steep terrain, at perpetual risk of landslides during typhoons and torrential rain. Such a scene is so commonplace in the mountains that it ceases to be ‘seen’, but blown up to this scale, certain details are amplified such as the solitary tree and the church cross, and gesture to the life that may lie behind or be ‘unearthed’ beneath concrete structures. Nona Garcia (b. 1978, Manila) received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting at the University of the Philippines. Solo shows include: Recovery, Bencab Museum, Baguio City (2014), Before the sea, West Gallery, Manila (2012), False Apparitions, Valentine Fine Art, Singapore (2012) or Somewhere Else, Finale Art File, Makati City, Manila (2012). Garcia has also participated in numerous exhibitions in China, Italy, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Korea and Japan. In 2003 she was a recipient of the 13 Artists Award and in 2000, Garica was the grand prize winner of the Philip Morris Group of Companies ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Art Award in Singapore.
