How to Make a Painting from Memory
Curated by Alana Traficante
Gallery 44, Toronto
6 January – 3 February 2024
Within the immigrant experience, the porousness of home is well understood. Home can exist however and wherever one so recognizes it. How To Make A Painting From Memory works with the emancipated spirit of the variable home, grounding ideas of the aether-place into the architectural structure of a house and the physical strength capable of bearing its weight.
—Philip Leonard Ocampo, “I. Logic surging through the Aether”
Home and community figure prominently in Stephanie Comilang’s composite installation of sculpture, still and moving images; communal architectures—whether built structures or the interdependency of people in place—are malleable, nomadic containers of memory and belonging. Grounded in a familiar Filipino image of the Bayanihan (men carrying wooden nipa, referencing the spirit of cooperation and being in-community), Thai female migrant storytellers in an adjacent film, whose vocalized memories of their family homes are also rendered as 3D-printed spirit houses, the exhibition elucidates concepts of communal unity, cooperation and the protective spirit of place as modes of diasporic home-making, reciprocity, trust and relationality.
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Stephanie Comilang, Installation view of How to Make a Painting from Memory, curated by Alana Traficante, Gallery 44, Toronto, 2024
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Stephanie Comilang, How To Make A Painting From Memory, 2022; HD video; 18′ 17″; Installation view of How to Make a Painting from Memory, curated by Alana Traficante, Gallery 44 Toronto, 2024
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Stephanie Comilang, Spirit House (Phra Phum) V, 2022; Installation view of How to Make a Painting from Memory, curated by Alana Traficante, Gallery 44 Toronto, 2024; PLA filament, paint, gold leaf, wallpaper background; House: 29.5 × 29.5 × 31.5 cm
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Stephanie Comilang, Spirit House (Phra Phum) II, 2022; Installation view of How to Make a Painting from Memory, curated by Alana Traficante, Gallery 44 Toronto, 2024; PLA filament, paint, gold leaf, wallpaper background; House: 23.5 × 27 × 35 cm
Stephanie Comilang, Spirit House (Phra Phum) I, 2022; Installation view of How to Make a Painting from Memory, curated by Alana Traficante, Gallery 44 Toronto, 2024; PLA filament, paint, gold leaf, wallpaper background; House: 15.5 × 40 × 26 cm
Stephanie Comilang, Spirit House (Phra Phum) IV, 2022; Installation view of How to Make a Painting from Memory, curated by Alana Traficante, Gallery 44 Toronto, 2024; PLA filament, paint, gold leaf, wallpaper background; House: 36 × 34 × 29.5 cm
Photos by Darren Rigo