JEL SUAREZ — b. 1990, Manila / Bacolod
I primarily move as collector, hunter, gatherer, de/constructor, arranger. Built on a practice of collage-making, my work is openly informed by the physicality of things, being composed of natural objects, such as paper, stones, odds and ends that I fortuitously find in surplus shops, books and wooden objects. I approach collage as a way of reading, reinterpreting, and responding to visual phenomena by restating these images as open codes and as new texts in the process of becoming.
There are naturally occurring senses that I harness and adapt to in these “things,” resulting in encounters of reconfigured archives. The artefacts playing a role in my work are thus recognized for but released from their old lives. Curiously, it is not only the object that is in a state of reconfiguration: the artist books and found objects that I play with and present also allow my readers and viewers the space to engage in open-ended, non-linear interaction with these materials. My work doubles as cartography, an unconscious mapping of images and materials into differing landscapes.
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Suarez has been granted artist residency at Rimbun Dahan (Selangor, MY) in 2017, and invited to Larga Artist Residency (Negros Occidental, PH) in 2019. She has shown her works abroad through Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. Recent exhibitions include arrivals, retrievals at Drawing Room Gallery (2021), and the finalist exhibition for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize at Art Central, Hong Kong (2022).
Her solo exhibitions with MO_Space Gallery (2019) and West Gallery (2018 & 2020), were consecutively shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards, where she became the first recipient of it’s Italian Embassy’s Purchase Prize.