[Applause]
how would you paint your own
self-portraits self-portraits are
selfies as we call it today is a very
modern idea whose practice goes back for
centuries selfies these days exist
mostly in the digital realm with
self-portraits when you see it and
galleries and museums makes you take a
step back and look at the painting or a
photograph it asks you to look
introspectively there's no next button
nor can you scroll up or down or skip to
the next painting you have to move
yourself you have to move your body in
relation to the objects in the room and
in relation to the space around you that
one self-portrait that was very
influential for me was Artemisia
Gentileschi
self-portrait as the allegory of
painting this image is powerful to me
because it shows an image civil women
who went through a lot but kept on
bouncing back uncovering how this woman
entered so much stood as a beacon for me
during a time when my life was filled
with darkness and chaos self-portraits
as the allegory of painting shows the
technical and personal difficulties that
Artemisia endured as a woman women in
the 17th century did not have a place in
society and to put that into historical
context the 17th century is a 1600s when
we think about the 1600s in art history
we think about that as the transitional
time between the late Renaissance and
the Baroque but when we think about the
Renaissance the artists who come to mind
are Leonardo Michelangelo
in the baroque of Bernini it's not often
that we think about women artists
because they were pushed to the margins
they were not considered to be part of
the main Renaissance and they were
branded to have their own Renaissance
which was called the other Renaissance
now could they be more explicit than
that women in the 17th century were
properties men fathers husbands brothers
they did not belong to in the public
sphere and they belonged only in the
domestic ROM where they cooked cleaned
and took care of the household does that
sound familiar to you
for a woman to have her own practice let
alone to have her own profession during
the 17th century was not allowed and by
virtue of doing it what we're not
supposed to one becomes marginalized for
a woman to have her own practice let
alone be an artist it wasn't her place
women were forbidden to do any of that
but Artemisia did it anyway and this
image comes alive because it shows an
image of a woman and triumph amidst all
the hardships she uses the technique
called chiaro-scuro which utilizes
darkness and lightness to form a
beautiful and classical composition she
uses foreshortening to paint a highly
realistic and difficult angle showing
herself in action showing herself in the
act of painting and by extension in the
act of changing herself and woman's
identity as an influential part of
society
artemisia self-portraits reminds me of
an individual who by prejudiced
standards of society tells you that you
cannot be more than the other that you
could only be in the sidelines now we
have all been the other at some point in
our life we have all been sidelined and
stood in the margins now how do you turn
that around that was the question that I
grappled with as they sat in my art
history courses and it brought me back
to a time when I told my mom that I want
to become an art historian for years
have been having this conversation with
my family at the dinner table my mom is
a successful accountant so she wanted me
to go into business the way that she did
my dad went to law school so he wanted
me to do the same thing and my grandma
for years has been joking around about
how none of her grandkids had followed
her footsteps in becoming a doctor I am
the other to my family
I'm already gay and had come out gay and
to come out again and tell them that I
don't want to do the things that they're
doing that I didn't want to go into
finance in health care cemented my place
in the margins cemented my place as the
other 72% of Filipino immigrants hold
degrees in finance in health care when
we moved to Canada but most of us don't
get to be in our own chosen fields
instead you'll see a swiping tables at
the food courts or sweeping the floors
at your local mall we leave everything
behind to start fresh my family and I
left everything behind when we moved to
Vancouver in 2004 we left her home we
left family home of known all my life
and we love friends who I grew up
playing in the dirt with we left our own
little communities and uprooted
ourselves from our very own cult
I left a four-year college basketball
scholarship to start fresh in Vancouver
and it wasn't easy we moved from the
noisy congested streets of Manila to the
calm and quiet orderliness of the
streets of Vancouver we moved from the
hot 30-something degree weather all year
long to the cold dark and lonely
Vancouver that was the start of my
transition to life here cold dark and
lonely even though I was with my family
I felt alone even though Vancouver was
orderly compared to the streets of
Manila I felt like my life was
catapulted into chaos and that someone
had painted my own self-portraits and it
couldn't recognize it I didn't have any
friends I didn't have my community and
most of all there were in many places I
can play basketball in picture that
that's was my self-portrait as a young
immigrant uprooted from my own home
displaced from the community that have
been part of for so long for the first
few years of my life I lived it as an
outsider here in Vancouver but after a
few years of living in isolation I
decided to reach out to the online
career community and I met up with a
bunch of people just off the park a
commercial drive now Commercial Drive is
this inclusive hippyish area that is a
hotbed for underground culture in
Vancouver some of us were new to this
town and some of us were trying to
figure out our own identity most of us
we're trying to find our own sense of
community and our way of doing that was
through travelling we did a hiking trips
surfing trips and snowboarding trips and
it was fun but costly
but being queer in the mid-2000s meant
that we didn't have the same resources
as we do now now we have queer sports
basketball softball volleyball queer
running clubs and my favorite even the
queer arts festival but back then we
didn't have those things and the
environment that fostered and nurtured
the queer community was the partying and
clubbing scene and as I was getting
deeper and deeper into the partying
scene I also started playing college
basketball suddenly I had friends here
and I was playing basketball again my
self-portrait changed from something
that was dark to something that was a
little bit more colorful I felt less and
less as an outsider and for a moment I
felt like I belong I was finally doing
with kids in their early 20s was
supposed to be doing which was clubbing
partying and giving my youthful body a
run for its money during the day I'd run
track for two hours and another to
playing basketball at night I'd go out
repeat that many times a week during the
weekends I'd hike the Grouse ride with
my teammates and then spend the rest of
the day getting wasted at wreckage now
grouse grind is that mountain that you
see across the water and instead of
taking the gondola up you climbed 2830
excruciatingly steps to get on top of
the mountain and wreck Beach is that
beautiful nude beach off the UVC with
diverse groups of people hang out with
their bits hanging out
but even though I had friends here and I
was playing basketball again
I still felt like an outsider sometimes
people would ask me the question of
where are you from and proudly I answer
I'm from Manila I've spent half my life
there and half of my life here and then
they reply with but your English is so
good and that always felt like a
backhanded comment to me because it
implies that I don't belong here
it's as if someone like me cannot act or
speak the same way even in basketball it
was great to be playing basketball again
but college teams can be very homophobic
that I was careful not to act too much
of a lesbian or not to look someone the
wrong way in the locker room especially
at a time when saying that song game was
the thing to say but even if it wasn't
okay we all remained silent so I hung
around with shallow friends and
homophobic individuals because it was
looking for external validation and I
was hoping that being externally
validated would paint my own
self-portrait but it never did and it
came at a cost I tore my left ACL
playing basketball at Capilano
University for those of you who don't
know what an ACL injury is it's a
career-ending injury for most of us it
takes six months to a year from the
point of injury to surgery to rehab and
most of us don't go back to playing
competitively again and just like that
with one swooping motion my
self-portraits turn from something
colorful to darkness once again
and I felt like a failure I was failing
my university courses and I was a failed
athlete but most of all I felt like a
failure to my family who had given up so
much to get me here
darkness forced me to take a long hard
look at myself through the tradition of
self portraiture and it reminded me of
artemisia self-portraits that's being
different and being the other failing
and not succeeding our places where we
can undo ourselves being in the margins
opens up creative cooperative and
surprising ways of being in the world in
relation to one another being different
offers a unique opportunity to grow out
of the box to grow out of the familial
and cultural expectations that are built
around us and being in art history
opened up my eyes to the idea of being
different than in each period in each
movement and in each moment in history
is defined by how different it is from
the rest and that's what Artemisia and
all the great artists and writers were
trying to do being different it's how we
make our own paths into making changes
in this world I fell in love with art
theory and philosophy so I found ways of
applying that in my practice as a
photographer and as a writer in
Vancouver and as an early career scholar
finding my own academic home here at SFU
myself portraits was different ten years
ago now it looks like this
I still want to become an art historian
and I'm still trying to figure out how
to do that now the conversations that I
have with my family are each are filled
with each of our own journeys and to
becoming our own person and one day when
my wife and I have kids in our own I
might expect them to follow our
footsteps but I'd be even more proud if
they had the courage to say no and
follow their own self portraiture is a
cumulative representation of what we've
done and what we've become and our
society's obsession with self portraits
is a reflection of how we are constantly
in the process of finding out who we are
and what we represent it is a process of
finding out how we can be different
looking back the people who we admire
are the ones who challenged the norm are
the ones who pushed the boundaries of
time and it wasn't an easy road for them
often they were branded as the outsiders
as different as the other so if you feel
marginalized in some way if you feel
different no matter how much you try not
to be embrace it and remember that being
the other is the place where change and
transformation begin be courageous in
the pursuit of your own self and be
unrelenting in painting her own
self-portrait thank you
[Applause]