Artist Statement
“Having immigrated at three and raised with a strong Filipino identity, I struggled to understand what it meant to be Filipino and American. Experiences of xenophobia and racism further complicated my understanding of how I fit within the southern community I lived in, the LDS church I was brought up in, my national country, and my birth country. This portrait contends with the difficulty to know oneself and to feel at home.
In the jungles of the Philippines, the Monstera clings to tree trunks, climbing to reach the light and splitting its upper leaves to ensure light reaches the leaves below. Like a monstera, this self-portrait and its many symbols–flags bleeding together, ancestral visitations, and contradictory signals of both coronation and concealment–connote splitting myself open to receive seemingly irreconcilable truths about me, my family, and the intertwined histories of the Philippines and the United States.”
About Victoria-Riza Hyde
Victoria-Riza Hyde is a fashion illustrator and portrait artist. Born in the Philippines and raised in Tennessee, she now resides in Central Illinois. Her earliest memories of drawing are from 3 years old, but it was at age 10, when she first picked up a fashion magazine, that her love for drawing fashion and portraits began. After earning a BFA in illustration, she found herself in a creative rut in which she realized that her training, and thus her portfolio, focused on a narrow range of body types, features, and skin tones. She recovered by aligning her illustration education to diverse beauty ideals and away from western standards, with a hope that all people can see their beauty captured in her work. When she’s not drawing and painting, Victoria is either creating with her two little ones, caring for her plants, mastering a Filipino dish, blogging on The Riza Magazine, or snacking on her latest dessert obsession. Victoria-Riza Hyde has worked with Packback Co., Pacificus Magazine, Pinayista, Kasama Rum, Isetta Co., and Alt Summit. Victoria’s work has been seen in Vanity Fair UK and this summer she had work exhibited in AnySquared Arts Home Not Home exhibition in Chicago.
