In her project ‘Ornamental Echoes’, Lizza May David deals with painting as a sensor for social change, which, embedded in a network of relations and encounters, postulates resistance and autonomy.

How can painting – in this case evolving from interacting communities – be read as resonance and resistance surface? How does those surfaces react, once in a process of transfer and shifting contexts?  When those paintings don’t stand beside itself any longer, seemingly falling out of themselves in able to be their own subjects?

Lizza's Website

After exploring the notions of the politisized image in mixed media art and documentary film, I am currently researching the notions of abstract painting starting from postwar avant-garde to facets of social realism, mostly in the socio/bio-political framework of the Philippine Archipelago. This research works independently from my current practice in painting but keeping an eye on the understanding of the canvas as sensorium for social change within specific localities. Through this personal painting practice, by holding dialogues in painting networks and the research in archives and collections, I seek to gain deeper insights on paintings’ materiality, sensualism, desires and proximities to outline its contemporaneity and contribute to a transnational painting historiography within multiple modernities.

Previous Projects:

Documentary filming was one of the tools to research about working conditions of the Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW), like in TWO YEARS MORE, 2006 or CYCLES OF CARE, 2011 – in other words to arise the issue of commodification of labo. In MODEL FAMILY AWARD, 2008, I looked more into how family relationships are being constructed in the philippine media. Later this lead to more abstract works about the transnational networks of anarchist movements in the 19th century, f.e. in SIMOUN, 2012 or issues of gaze and transnational desire in post-colonial photography in THE UNKNOWN FILIPINA, 2011, a work which deals with desire, female body and capitalism, questioning media-immanent conditions and qualities.