Lips of a thousand nine hundred ninety six teachers

Opening: Friday May 31, at 7pm
Event at Spacecraft Brewery : Monday May 27, at 5:30pm

Lips of one thousand nine hundred ninety six teachers, attempts to illustrate the elusive process of documenting and depicting a portrait of a place from the perspective of an outsider. For his first artist residency in Ontario, Cruz embarks on a quest to perform as a critical tourist loosely researching the history, cultural memory and visual aesthetics of his host community, Sudbury.

The predicament of mistranslations and translations this residency entails is co-piloted by Cruz’s artistic ethos of channeling the spirit of play as a strategy to balance and countermeasure the expectations of his research and production. These paradoxical views of presenting facts and fiction commensurate within the title of the exhibition. Taken from a line in Stephen Nachmanovitch’s book Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art and an homage to the founding year of Galerie Du Nouvel-Ontario in 1996; a consideration in which Cruz pays tribute to the years that had gone by since the birth of GNO’s extensive programming and cultural outreach.

Parallel to Cruz’s experience as an immigrant from the Philippines, his random improvised excursions to familiarize himself and to further understand his new culture enabled him to deeper understand the differences and similarities of cultures that shared colonial history, marginalization of indigenous communities and cultural cross-overs from settlers. Guided by his intuitive multi-disciplinary practice, Cruz utilizes various methods of gleaning information and production such as meandering the city through a dérive, documentation of his encounters, online research and cooking Filipino food in exchange for oral stories from the locals.

Entangled by the artist’s subjectivity to witness an experience guided by discursive decisions made over the course of his stay. The traces left by these moments and encounters, which are but some of the many possibilities this universe holds, are retrieved, assembled and presented in the form of an undetermined installation – a portrait in progress hovering between a docufiction about a city, its people and its present state.

Spacecraft Brewery