Silverlens New York is pleased to present Catalina Africa: Earth Body Bukid, her first solo exhibition in the US, opening March 6, 2025. For Earth Body Bukid, Africa draws on landscape magic and nature energies from the West Pacific Coast of Baler, known for both its reputation as a surfer’s paradise and location within the Philippines’ “typhoon belt.” Across a shapeshifting practice in painting, sound, sculpture, video, text, and performance, Africa calls upon the natural landscape. With Earth Body Bukid, Africa’s all-new paintings resemble spells, songs, love letters, prayers, and maps that pay testimony to the Earth’s mysteries and magic.

The exhibition’s title refers to the Tagalog word for “farm,” or a place that is cultivated and cared for to grow food—a title that Africa is also considering for her family’s farm. This simultaneous naming implies that both the exhibition and farm grow alongside and inform each other, a sentiment that is evocative of Africa’s practice that is deeply connected to the landscape and its spirits. The artist’s surrounding environment in Baler—a small coastal town protected by the Sierra Madre mountain range and the Pacific ocean—has heavily shaped her work since moving there with her family in 2015. In fact, Africa has described herself and her canvases as intermediaries or channels through which the landscape expresses itself, a devotional practice that connects and honors the landscape in the realms of both the seen and the felt environment. Africa’s understanding and perception of space is equally informed by her training in classic violin, in which sound acts as a portal into a different place—both visually in the mind’s eye, and physically through vibrational transmutation.

Earth Body Bukid unites three all-new paintings of various sizes, where smaller “plant portraits” are displayed alongside a larger “map.” Painting maps and plants constitutes part of Africa’s approach to cultivating a relationship to the land, becoming embedded within it. In viewing painting as the final “fruit” of a chain of practices the artist enacts with the landscape—practicing soil restoration, making compost, growing food, concocting herbal medicine and essences—the artist’s canvases are the result of an embodied and lived experience of the Earth.

Multi-disciplinary artist Catalina Africa (b. 1988, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Baler, Philippines) considers shapeshifting to be her primary mode of expression. Working across mediums including painting, sound, sculpture, video, text, and performance, her artworks are invocations to the natural landscape. Resembling spells, songs, love letters, prayers, and maps, her spatial visualization of an environment pays testimony to the Earth’s mysteries and magic. Raised in Manila, the artist now lives and works in Baler, Philippines, along with her husband and child, where she cultivates a devotional practice to Spirit, transmuting Earth song and collaborating with the living land.

Africa has mounted numerous solo exhibitions, with recent shows including Shrine in the Shape of Shadow, Silverlens Manila (2022); Spiralling in Starlight Vision, ArtInformal, Manila (2022); The Quality of Sunlight is a Filter Through Which Our Thoughts and Feelings Pass, Silverlens, Manila (2019). Africa’s select group exhibitions include 12x9x35, West Gallery, Manila (2024); Shrines, Silverlens, New York (2023); Phantasmapolis x Manila: Select works from the 2021 Asian Art Biennial, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Manila (2022); Phantasmapolis, Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2021); Out of Every Pore a Universe Breaks, Vargas Museum, Manila (2021); 3rd Kamias Triennial, Kamias Special Projects, Cubao (2020); and Wild Legend, Juming Museum, New Taipei City (2015). She has participated in international residencies, including TRADES AiR, Honolulu, Hawaii (2019) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, Maine (2014), among others.