Michelle Dizon: Perpetual Peace
18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA, USA
June 18 - September 7, 2012
For her summer Artist Labs project and exhibition at 18th Street Arts Center, and coinciding with her participation in Made in LA, the first LA Biennial, LA-based artist MICHELLE DIZON will create a large-scale video installation entitled Perpetual Peace. This seven-channel video installation will be a further development of a series of ongoing works around imperialism, neocolonialism, and globalization in the Philippines, for which she is gaining much local and international recognition.
Michelle Dizon, Perpetual Peace, 2011
Image courtesy of the artist and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA
Over the past four years, MICHELLE DIZON has worked in video to document sites in the Philippines impacted by economic globalization. These sites have included the areas around former US military bases, the extraction of natural resources by multinational corporations, and the war-torn regions of the southern Philippines. At 18th Street’s main gallery, Michelle Dizon will weave video that she has shot together with archival footage, text from philosophical, political, and literary sources, and sounds composed from field recordings, scores, and voice, into an intricate work that invites viewers to reflect upon diasporic subjectivity, postcolonial history, and the effects of global capitalism in the Philippines.
Michelle Dizon will divide the main gallery into four rooms, each of which will hold a chapter of Perpetual Peace. Organized across the themes of discourse, history, economy, and subjectivity, each chapter is a layer linked by the viewer’s movement through the time and space of the installation. Elements of the work include wall text around war, imperialism, and democracy, historical footage of US militarization contrasted with the ruins of contemporary bases, forms of labor and production in the industries of mining, fishing, and banana plantation interspersed with interviews with workers, and a lush, dreamlike, and perpetually dissolving set of landscapes set against some of Michelle Dizon’s own reflections on life, death, land, return and passage.
Perpetual Peace invites the public into a dense and layered experience of the postcolonial diaspora in the Phillipines, where shifts in space and time expose a complexity of psychic and social effects of diaspora and a nuanced and thought-provoking perspective on economic globalization.
18th Street Arts Center
Santa Monica, CA 90404
www.18thstreet.org
