Katie Revilla
Instagram: @katierevilla
Website: https://katierevilla.net
Bio: Katie Revilla is an anti-disciplinary artist that considers the hybridization of nature and material to convey narratives centered around the Filipino diaspora and post colony. She has exhibited her work throughout the U.S. and the Philippines and has been awarded support for her research from UC Berkeley, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Northwestern University. Her work has been shown throughout the U.S., and included in exhibitions at Southern Exposure, SF; Root Division, SF; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; New Wight Gallery, LA; Knockdown Center, NY; Printed Matter, NY; Block Museum of Art, Chicago; among others. She has been published in Vogue Magazine, KQED Arts, Inga Books, and Platform Editions. Her work is in the collection of the City of Oakland and the Block Museum of Art. In 2017, she received a BFA in Art Practice and the Lauren Krikorian Award from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2018, Revilla was an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, a recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship in 2020-2021. She graduated from Northwestern University in 2023 with an MFA in Art, Theory, and Practice and was awarded the Paschke Grant. Currently, she has work on view at the Hyde Park Art Center for the Ground Floor Biennial and a solo presentation at /(Slash) Gallery in Minnesota Street Projects, San Francisco. She is a member of the collective, Real Time and Space in Oakland, CA.
Statement: Through former ownership, magical realism, and proximity to specific events, I stage detailed assemblages to create an experience that is not historically factual, but rather a fragmented journey through systems of belief, value, and reconciliation. Using modes of collaboration, often with resonant sound, plant species, and spirits, I consider their relationships to collective history and private memory. Materials are often presented untouched, allowing the internal contradictions to quietly unravel through recontextualization, while others are transformed to compress time and movement. These components are meant to articulate the multiplicity of what it means to try to embody an intangible heritage through examining the lens of national identity.
The framework of my practice is largely driven by examining personal relationships to land, labor, and belonging through generational inheritance to explore larger systemic constructs through which cultural aphasia takes form. These ideas are conveyed through the lens of my own family’s lineage of whiteness, racial passing, and migration from the Philippines. I facilitate performances to translate metaphors of value and resiliency within hybridity, largely driven by how that can shift and amplify boundaries of objectification. From collecting objects that were discarded at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco to the reinterpretation of Filipino Martial Arts as a form of ritual, protection, and conjuring. I find connecting points in my work through the value that artifacts, locations, and landscapes are attributed in relation to their possession. All together, my work takes form through a composite of imaginaries and remembrances that present the ways in which we speculate and even fabricate our own desire to authenticate ourselves.
