MYRA KALAW Unknown only to me, I entered the forest through a place (2003-2023)

MYRA KALAW
Unknown only to me, I entered the forest through a place (2003-2023)
Pulp painting on handmade abaca-flax-cotton paper
54” X 54”
$2,000

ARTIST STATEMENT:
I grew up under the shadow of Martial Law and experienced the light of the People Power Revolution. When I immigrated to Chicago at 16, I felt very disconnected from my peers, and it took many years to find my own tribe of artists. Since my exposure to art came from my love of literature and letters, my visual work tends toward the calligraphic and graffiti-esque. By cutting the paintings into smaller parts and structuring them on a grid, I aim to create a new vocabulary to transform my personal experience into a visual symphony. A painting’s entire image may be frozen in time, but by reassembling them I attempt to allow the original images to redirect and form new connections. An alchemical distillation happens: new worlds form. The paintings become portals to new ideas and possibilities — a record in time that in my desire to transcend, I have transcended.

ARTIST BIO:

Myra Kalaw (she, her, siya) is a poet, born and raised in the Philippines, where she first discovered a love for books and reading. In college she studied Writing, Poetics and Interdisciplinary Book & Paper Arts, and spent summers at the Bread & Puppet Theater in Vermont learning how to make big puppets, paint cantastorias and make sideshows. She received further technical instruction in making puppet shows from the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, where she became one of the 8 inaugural resident artists of Chicago Puppet Lab from 2021-2022. Myra is an active member of CIRCA-Pintig Community Theatre, the local SINAG artists group, and the Filipino American Historical Society. When not interviewing Filipino Americans in her community, Myra can be found making handmade paper goods for digital connoisseurs at www.cubivino.net