University Calendar

The Montclair State University Galleries will present Caroline Garcia’s Dancing on Axes and Spears from January 31 through April 21, 2023, which invites visitors to stretch their understandings of Filipino cultural traditions, community resilience, and personal identity in the artist’s first solo museum exhibition featuring an interactive martial arts gym, virtual and augmented reality artworks, and various forms of choreography. The exhibition will be on view at the George Segal Gallery, the University Galleries’ flagship exhibition space.

Garcia’s works explore her Filipino identity, assimilation and cultural memory, and Indigeneity through diasporic and feminist perspectives. Employing video, performance, sculpture, and installation, Garcia addresses a central theme of  “alterity” – an anthropological term meaning "otherness” – to mark her position in the diaspora where distance, language barriers, and colonization fracture traditional knowledge.

In Garcia’s single-channel digital video, Queen of the Carabao, 2018, the artist rides a water buffalo species native to the Philippines through her father’s ancestral farmlands and taps into traditional ways of life that she encountered during her visits to the Philippines as a child. Further expanding upon ideas of melancholia in relation to homeland and family, Garcia mourns her mother’s death from cancer in the VR artwork Choose Your Fighter, 2020. Surrounded by floating screens featuring women of color offering advice and wisdom and armed with an Indigenous Filipino blowpipe known as a sumpit, Garcia channels Indigenous forms of resistance and resilience as a way to process her grief.

Garcia also pairs these aspects of loss and longing with her experiences living in the United States and growing up in Australia. In a newly commissioned installation, Garcia has designed a training facility focused on the needs of AAPI (and BIPOC) women, girls, and gender-nonconforming femmes to examine violence as a tool for self-preservation. The Gallery will be equipped with punching bags, plants used to make poison, and training armaments. Visitors are invited to interact with various components of the installation through written prompts outlined by Garcia and find their own relationship to violence within a spectrum of offense and defense.

The works featured in the exhibition are emblematic of the ways Garcia resists assimilation tactics within colonized land through unique survival strategies informed by elements of Indigenous Filipino culture and traditions including martial arts and spirituality, technology, and community collaborations. Garcia’s exhibition at Montclair State University Galleries builds upon these themes and their relationships to larger systems including immigration, selfhood, and safety.

The exhibition is curated by Jesse Bandler Firestone, curator and exhibition coordinator of the University Galleries.

“Garcia reflects on feelings of belonging and alienation from her ancestral homeland in the Philippines and her current home in the United States, through a range of media and approaches,” Firestone said. “Her reverence for Indigenous practices, sensitivity to issues of authenticity, and embrace of corresponding nuances related to her diasporic identity create a complicated, sentimental, and layered exhibition that conveys overlapping issues that are not easily distilled.”

Exhibit is open at the George Segal Gallery:

Tuesday – Friday 12 – 5 p.m.

Thursday 12 – 7 p.m.

January 31 through April 21