exhibition overview

Point of Departure has several parts to it. It’s also still very much a work in progress.

First, it’s a large suite of 40 small, inter-related paintings from my ongoing work focusing on Filipina nurses and immigration narratives. (More paintings are currently underway). In an exhibition context, each of the paintings is compositionally tied to another, in groupings both horizontal and vertical, somewhat like a crossword puzzle.

Exhibition opportunities are wonderful, but they come with fundamental limits as to who has access to seeing the art, who can afford to be there, for how long, and in what context. When the paintings were initially exhibited in 2007, I made postcards of several of the images, and had them available as free art that museum visitors could take with them.

These postcards bore the URL for a Point of Departure web project, as a means of invitation. There’s just a simple place-holder of sorts there right now, but you’re welcome to view what’s currently up by clicking on the last image here. Once the site is fully operational, visitors will be able to rearrange the paintings into their own narratives, along horizontal or vertical grids. Static images aren’t really all that static: the same story can be told multiple ways. I’d like to open that process up.