Ysabel Flores
College of Fine Arts Studio Art (MFA)
Tablescape
I am primarily a painter, exploring a variety of materials and mediums to unpack ideas, ask questions, and process life. Wanting to confront ideas of identity, religion, and untold histories, I have spent a lot of time observing my surroundings, jotting down ideas in sketchbooks and listening to other people’s stories, but telling my own has not been as easy. As a second-generation Filipino American growing up in the South, I have often lived in the shadow of a Western culture and landscape. Most of my connections to my Filipino heritage have been strictly tied to my familial relationships.
Currently enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at Florida State University, I continually expand my research to include new materials and perspectives that can help illustrate my distanced relationship to the Philippines. As a medium, I find painting to be a slow but necessary process that challenges me to sit in the discomfort, the confusion, and the feelings that are not so easily captured. Through tearing the canvas apart and weaving it back together, I feel that I am able to approach images and materials in alternative ways through which I can share my ideas and inspire curiosity. Ripping images apart allows me to strip down the perfection that I so often try to chase in landscape paintings, while the act of weaving them back together results in an alternative way of looking at things. Every line, every color, and every tear help me process ideas and communicate them in new ways.
Artwork Description:
Tablescape is an experimental painting that resembles the puzzle of knowing and not knowing. Growing up without an understanding of the Philippines, I had often downplayed my ethnic heritage, overlooking the one and only Filipino painting my family owned without a second thought. I traded in any curiosity for that world for the wholesale adoption of Western ideas, values, and history. In deconstructing this painting of a Philippine idyllic landscape, I tore apart my old ideas of that world and wove those strips of canvas with pieces of white tablecloth to reflect the gaps in knowledge I had previously accepted.