Wazzup Pilipinas!
A visual autobiography conveys an array of masquerades. The inaccessible becomes accessible and vice versa. The photographer dissipates into the currency of images and this pre-supposed self is often just felt through fragments or mere traces of himself.
Through autobiography, Cruz presents an examination of the self in the present meddling between reality and imagined fictions. This brings together his works for the last three years. Altogether, this exhibition is a culmination of his multiple impressions concerning his identity with the camera as a mental and physical barrier that distances him from himself while also bringing him closer to himself. It also takes places in particular spaces recollecting the tropes of familiar and the unfamiliar, reassessing his places and cities of dwelling into his own particular aesthetic field. And in between these two polarities, lies the ambiguous tropes of elsewheres that add another layer to the narratives he creates by way of his images.
This takes us to fragments of crucial bodies of work in his catalogue from his paradoxical and humorous self-portraits called You as Me wherein he puts together self-portraits using other people to stand in for him to his playful contradiction of a personal documentary through Artificial Memory. Meanwhile, his study of human bodies within the realm of the global and the universal presupposes subjective desires on his subjects working alongside the operative of intimacy through corps tendu while working alongside the landscape of different heres and theres from his archives.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
