Dogeater (48" x 21")
Tempera, Oil, Chalkboard, Paint, Instant Coffee, Photocopies, Gold Leaf, on Manila Folder and Panel.

I was born in 1972, then - Philippine President Ferdinand Macros declared Martial Law.

My generation was later referred to in academia as "martial law babies". Growing up at a time when our country's Constitution was replaced by an authoritarian regime, I had first-hand experience of the indignity of tyranny. Power struggles, identity politics, critique of institution and the marginal site are integral to my heritage as an artist.

I am a weaver of history and heritage. In my work, I tell stories that are grounded upon layers of culture creating a kind of contemporary folk art that attempts to find the border between mass culture and contemporary realism. As a muralist, the process of mural - making involves working upon intrinsic ideas and images provided by the sponsoring community, resulting in a convergence that creates and projects information in a public scale, trasforming a site into a place. On the other hand, painting entails intimate investigation of paint and surface as well as the creation of mechanisms of secrecy or what Martin Heidegger refers to as unconcealment, a kind of surfacing of the unseen. Thus, I indulge in a scientific - type of cultural exploration which is both factual and provocative; unearthing the past as a means to herald the future.

I believe that the personal is universal; thus, my artistic goal is to reconcile the history of my lineage with the history of painting. The series I began after my summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1992 engaged a process similar to the community - collaborative nature of murals that allowed me to use various found objects that have an individual inherent emotional charge. The first of these materials were worn Manila folders, which have been used to file student work and records. I call this the Manila Project. The Manila folder not only implies information on file, but also this paper originated from Manila hemp (which is indigenous to the Philippines), implying a connection to Manila, the capital city of the Philippines. Additionally, I use Manila folder as a metaphor for the invisibility and indifference to Filipino Americans in American society.

I became an artist because I believe that art is the best way to document communities. My collaboration with neighborhoods in creating public art, as well as my personal work in the studio, is an introspection of decoding (a): encrypted forms of personal and social forms of expression and how supressed cultures re-identify themselves through the matrix of oppression; as well as, (b): how various cultures promote their patrimonial resources from ancestral cultural sites, to natural wonders, to contemporary public markets, down to toys. By rendering memory and blood relations in a process that manifests knowledge in a private voice vs. projecting information in a public stage, my lineage has found its translation from murals to painting.

- Eliseo Art Silva