Marina Cruz

This work is in good condition overall, as is the canvas. There is minor wear and handling to the edges, but the paint layers are well-preserved and stable. Under ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed, on stretcher.
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One of Marina Cruz’s extensive projects is her series of paintings that pay detailed attention to clothes and textiles from the collection of her grandmother who was a seamstress in the 1950s. The fabric folds she depicts sometimes appear like visual representations of intricate mental states, and the clothes themselves lend to their wearers a statuesque appearance. In “My mother’s red and white polka-dot dress,” the underside of a little girl’s dress lies faintly-lit before a dark background. In this manner it is laid down like an artifact loaded with clues of the soul that used to own it.

By merely representing in her painting, Marina Cruz mimics the craft of her grandmother and also the tradition of the dress being passed on to other siblings. The underside of the dress is a more earnest portrayal of the material, as it shows the dress devoid of design or decoration. Instead, the stitches and the linings show. Wilted, it appears to make a gentle impression of the body it used to cover. The thin lining mutes the polka dot design. That detail, in the perspective of such inwardness, such a degree of intimacy, seems immensely personal. The story is not revealed in the instant but upon lingering in a moment of being confronted by the surface that the wearer feels against her skin. As with Cruz’s work in general, such paintings emphasize the tension between representation and experience which leads us to the difficulty of transparent, unmediated perception of personal lives.

Marina Cruz has shown prominently in several exhibitions in Manila and internationally. In 2007, she won both the grand prize of the Philippine Art Awards and the Ateneo Art Awards which gave her the opportunity to attend a fellowship at La Trobe University’s Visual Arts Center in the same year. She was also awarded the Freeman Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in 2008.