Campbelltown Arts Centre has a reputation for commissioning new work by artists living in its wider region. Proclaim Your Death! by Western Sydney-based, Filipina-Australian artist Marikit Santiago, is another example of the ambition these opportunities allow.
A former Sulman Prize winner (2020) and recipient of last year’s prestigious La Prairie Art Award (both presented by the Art Gallery of NSW), Santiago is almost exclusively known for her oil paintings of her family.
This exhibition is a great example of just how a big prize win or funding can bolster one’s practice, and give an artist the breathing space to travel, research and explore a next direction. And, walking into the galleries this shift is immediately clear. While Santiago continues her signature use of cardboard instead of canvas, she has pushed that into a room-sized installation for this exhibition.
Our expectations of her luscious, pseudo-classical paintings are tempered by a more layered approach, this time presented as vignettes in the first gallery, with the addition of an urn of flowers off to the side of a stepped podium.
Despite this added layer – on already heavily symbolic works – Santiago has pared back this hang, keeping it almost sparse. It is a brave next step in her work.
Santiago has pulled on her relationship with AGNSW to appropriate works from their collection. It is a device she has often used to “interrogate historical biases and offer alternate perspectives reflecting on culture, history, and migration,” explains curator Adam Porter, but for this exhibition her interrogation deviates from religious subject matter to a more mythological foundation.
For example, in this gallery is a narrow painting, titled Mangkukulam (2024), which sits above a shelf. On its underside is a collection of candles. The artwork explores the practice of witchcraft in Filipino culture, and is populated by her children dressed in their school uniforms and caught in a trance-like stasis. A floral arrangement is rendered upside down, just like the candles. The backdrop is the Parramatta River foreshore, suturing locations, beliefs and cultures together.
It takes its cue from Mythological subject (c.1560), a painting by Andrea Schiavone in the AGNSW collection, and mirrors its poses in a timeless co-existence of past and presence. Santiago typically projects her Filipina-Australian experience onto the canon of Western art history, and Mangkukulam follows that thread.
This gallery is filled with further examples of such pairings. Of special note are two portraits presenting Santiago paired with her husband, Shaw: The Reign of Greed (2024) – taking its cue from Francesco Solimena’s painting Noli me tangere (1718-20) where Mary Magdalene encounters Jesus after his resurrection (and also the title of the revolutionary novel by Philippine national hero, José Rizal). Another painting by Santiago, Bathala and Diyan Masalanta (2024), points to Jacques Blanchard’s Mars and the vestal virgin (c. 1637-8), which portrays a key episode in the mythology of Rome’s founding, based on a rape.
Typically, Santigo shifts the agency in her version, playing out tensions between expected behavior and defiance.
In the second gallery, viewers are invited to continue to draw connections between religiosity, Catholicism and mythology, and the contemporary lived experience. This display consists of three parts (installation, altar and watercolours) and is presented as one installation, titled The Glamour of Evil (2024). Painting takes a backseat here.
A large-scale cardboard installation of a church façade, designed by Santiago’s architect father, Noy, references the Spanish Baroque-style of San Agustin Church in Manila. Both Noy and Santiago’s mother are depicted on the painted doors of the installation, mimicking the retablo wood carvings typically found in Filipino churches.
The watercolours caught my eye in particular. Here, the artist juxtaposes the seven deadly sins with their opposing virtues, played out by herself and her husband. While Santiago has long made watercolours, it is an interesting move to show these for the first time (perhaps one ushered in by a demand for her work).
These pieces have a freedom and a lightness of touch that the oil paintings don’t have. They are also mounted to echo church architecture and the stations of the cross, cohesively connecting these otherwise disparate bodies of work.
A constant is Santiago’s family – both as subject and collaborator. Completing the exhibition in a smaller gallery space is the installation Altar Altar, created with her children, Maella, Santi and Sarita. The hands-on workshop space encourages kids to find their own creative expression, with a focus on self-representation and family.
Read: Exhibition review: Helle Cook, Nordic Light – Beyond Horizons, Grey Street Gallery
Overall, this is a well thought-out exhibition, and a brave show by Santiago, which evolves and extends her painting practice – just like the very nature of diasporic identity. It can be a raw exposé to confront one’s cultural history from a position of displacement, and the kinds of negotiations adopted to make sense of that resilience, without tipping over into mythology.
Santiago has again proven that she is a master of this domain.
Marikit Santiago: Proclaim Your Death!
Artists: Marikit Santiago in collaboration with Noy Santiago, Maella Santiago, Santi Santiago and Sarita Santiago
Curator: Adam Porter
Assistant Curator: Sam Spragg
Campbelltown Arts Centre
4 January – 16 March 2025
Free
