Description
This catalog was printed in conjunction with the exhibition Field Notes, on display in the Main Gallery April 20 – May 28, 2023 featuring the work of Jason Reblando.
How do we talk about the past? And how does photography impact our perception of the past? Jason Reblando’s series, Field Notes, dives into the cultural archive to attempt to answer these questions and more, using appropriation and found images to interrogate the history of the artist’s medium.
Artist Statement
I am a Filipino-American photographer and artist, and I have been creating mixed-media photocollages based upon archival images from the American colonial period in the Philippines for my project titled Field Notes. By physically cutting, pasting, and rearranging various elements of images upon images, I aim to deconstruct and critique the colonial gaze, while attempting to reclaim the photographic narrative. In some collages, the cut patterns reference textile-makers across the Philippine archipelago, while in other collages, shapes and silhouettes allude to a problematic colonial past.
Field Notes is a meditation upon the long, complex relationships between the Philippines and the United States, anthropology and photography, and mass media and society. By weaving historical photographs into my own contemporary art practice, I recontextualize archives that codified colonial power dynamics between the United States and the Philippines. Ultimately, I hope that my project will contribute to a growing conversation by contemporary artists who are eager to interrogate the colonizing power of the archive, not only for Filipinos, but for all members of the Global South.
About Jason Reblando
Jason Reblando is an artist and photographer based in Normal, Illinois. He received his MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, and a BA in Sociology from Boston College. He is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines, an Artist Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council, and a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, Politico, Camera Austria, Slate, Bloomberg Businessweek, Marketplace, MAS Context, Real Simple, Places Journal, Chicago Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Reader. His photographs are collected in the Library of Congress, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Pennsylvania State University Special Collections, the Midwest Photographers Project of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is currently serving on the Society for Photographic Education Board of Directors (2022-2026) and is an Assistant Professor of Photography in the Wonsook Kim School of Art at Illinois State University.
