Past
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Ego Placebo
Wiley
January 26 - March 15, 2019
Photos courtesy Ryan Patrick Kruger © 2019
Ego Placebo centers itself in the canon of contemporary Filipino-American art: the artist lives in an amalgam of two cultures — one by choice and one by force — both conditional. The artist mines her personal mythology into aesthetic expressions wherein the viewer projects their own connections to and interpretations of the exhibited works. Ego Placebo stares back at the forces that made the artist hate her body, the same forces that allow Others to navigate their social environments without ever interrogating their corporeal form. Ego Placebo reaches for a traditional way of knowing obscured by centuries of European colonization, wherein meaning is mutable and intuition is logic. Ego Placebo is an audacious celebration of the Self. Ego Placebo seeks the edge of Western limitation, a hedonistic exploration of pleasure and pain.
The Self is the first lens through which one views the world. It is the rawest and freest material born of impulse; existing both as a construct by which its wearer can navigate their cultural environment and a construct through which its wearer may reveal themselves to the Other. Value placed on the latter construct by the Other is debatable, shifting with the certainty of the stock market. If the Self is obscured through interference, one undertakes a journey to reclaim what was taken or adapts to an existence where the Self is decentralized; unknowable without an Other.
How does the Self survive a culture that hates it? What tools, in defiance of empirical logic, help it adapt to the environments its cultures occupy?
Wiley (b. 1995, she/her) Filipino-American artist from Honolulu, HI. Wiley holds a BFA from Portland State University. Wiley creates self-reflective works with materials and methods associated with her childhood in an effort to better understand how her lived experiences create and shape who she is. She has exhibited works in Hawaii and Oregon including Pacific University and Portland State University. Wiley’s work is in the private collections of Mike Rutherford and Pacific University, and was featured in Sculpture Magazine. She was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from the International Sculpture Center, and a Juried Commendation from the Arlene Schnitzer Visual Arts Prize.