I was born six months before martial law was instituted making me a martial law baby. I've never known a time outside of it. By the time I left the Philippines around 1980-81, martial law was lifted.
It was never really discussed. The only words that stuck in my memory was my grandfather, a Taiwanese immigrant, telling my mother that there is no future in the Philippines and for us to leave.
It doesn't seem that much has changed. The power slightly shifted out for a time but never really left. Can one truly go home?
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
TALA OLIVER MATEO [pronouns: they/them] is an interdisciplinary artist[s] whose current visual work gives shape to a variety of forms grounded in painting and printmaking processes. They employ varied artistic mediums to playfully juxtapose conventionally gendered materials with the unconventional. Furthermore, they chronicle complex narratives imbedded with issues regarding race, gender relationships, performance, language, and memory through customized and re-purposed gender enhancing prosthetics as art materials.
Philippine-born, American artist, OLIVER MATEO immigrated to the U.S. in 1980. Raised as a child of a beauty queen and U.S. military dependent, OLIVER’S work is informed and influenced by periodic experiences of living with and occupying spaces within hyper-gendered environments. These particular locales, in close proximity with "foreign" cultures, is also where negotiations between language and ways of being are repeatedly self-monitored, scrutinized, redacted, supplemented and reintroduced. Complicating these cyclical patterns and ultimately reconstituting these encounters through visual and performative mediums, processes, and practices, they create realms where altered objects, personas, and characters rebelliously exist and flourish outside and beyond the bounds of the norm.
OLIVER received a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz and TALA received an M.F.A.
from the University of California, Irvine, and has been shown in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. They live and work in Los Angeles.