DOMINION is a new installment to Wawi Navarroza's body of works which tackles topography and heterotopic spaces. It presents the artist's return to landscape where she neither treats nature as a spectacle nor confines it into a picaresque framework. Instead, she intervenes into the symmetries of volcanic landforms, the expanse of starry skies and the stretch of the sea to record certain ways of seeing.

As much it is an exercise of looking, the exhibition presents the dichotomous relationship of an artist to the landscape when she chooses to frame such an ambiguous, omnipresent subject matter. It presents to us the question of who or what is conquered, artist or nature?

DOMINION is also Navarroza's send-off exhibition before she leaves for Spain to accomplish a year-long scholarship for a European Masters in Fine Art Photography awarded by Istituto Europeo di Design, Madrid.

Words by Siddhartha Pérez 

DOMINION centers around my return to landscape which was heralded by a catastrophe now transfigured into a pursuit of volcanoes and the shaping of land. In the wake of a disaster that wiped out my studio in 2010, after the tropical storm “Basyang” yanked out an apocalyptic gaping hole through my walls, my first illogical impulse was to leave. And head to a volcano.

I was never the athletic outdoorsy type but I was propelled by my fascination and a human desire to look for what is uncharted (at least in my personal history). In this short span of time, I have sought out and went crate- hopping volcanoes Mayon, Taal, Pinatubo and took an uncalculated going-for-broke decision to fly on New Year’s Day to the volcanic islands of Hawai’i, home of granoma Pele, climb Mauna Kea, Kilauea and drive alone endlessly on monotonous long roads in a mammoth 4x4, to experience the ground where new land is being formed everyday through a continous active flow of lava extending itself to the bigger ocean.

It was a self-styled solo expedition. Part Nat-Geo and part Desolation Angels.

As I carried my heavy gear, hiked lava rocks, fought altitude and slept in the wilderness all by myself 9,000 feet above sea, in the dark, with nothing but an
overwhelming dome of a million stars, almost within reach, I came face to face with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

The resulting images are deadpan documents, views. The tall tales have lied supine, at peace with itself. This is not the story of Photographer, The Hero. My personal story had a purpose in the making but ultimately fuses within the matter-of-fact depiction of anonymous landscapes. The image is confident.

In few of the works I have staged an interaction with the landforms and covered it in 6 meters of white cloth: an attempt to shape it? Define it? Or a white cloth to surrender? Or to adorn nature with a veil for its beauty or seeming ‘innocence’? Or perhaps a symbolic funereal fabric covering what is brute, merciless and indifferent--that is also the face of the sublime?

DOMINION measures this geometry.

The size of the photographs--mostly 40x60 inches, and a paneled piece of 5 x 7.5 feet--echo the immensity of scale found in traditional landscape paintings, akin to Italian vedute. On the other end, the work moves away from the tradition of postcard-photos with spectacular vistas and sweeping landscapes. Lastly, I’m including an installation cascade of polygonal coconuts casted in synthetic fiberglass reinforced plastics to take us all back full circle. The gallery is Land, KM Zero. I’m interested to see how the works eventually change the topography of the gallery and the viewing of photography.

See you in a year.

- Wawi Navarroza
DOMINION
March 2011

Wawi Navarroza is a visual artist/professional photographer based in Manila, Philippines. She graduated with a Bachelor of arts degree from De La Salle University, Manila and attended courses at the international Center of Photography, New York.

Her work with contemporary photography has taken shape in highly-stylized symbolic mise-en-scène and tableau vivants to her more recent interest in the head-on dead pan recording of still life and the everyday sublime. Her return to landscape focuses on “Place”, mapping out heterotopic sites that exist in nature and in urban spaces, which are then relocated into photographs and constructed further by future memory and/or amnesia.

Navarroza has widely exhibited in the Philippines and internationally in Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Russia, Mongolia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea. She was selected as exhibiting artist for the touring exhibition “CUT: New Photography from South East Asia” organized
by Valentine Willie Fine Art, ASEAN-Korea “Emerging wave” Asian Contemporary Photography Exhibition in Seoul, Korea (2010) and “Verso Manila: contemporary art from the Philippines” in Turin, Italy (2009).