In “Overland,” Nona Garcia offered an experience of both immensity and calm. She works on a grand scale to depict scenes of tranquility, objects finding repose in a mountain expanse or rainforest. Overland, 2023, measures some twelve feet across; the painting, framed, is propped up by real boulders. It portrays an abandoned and battered truck, with parts missing, parked on a mountaintop. Behind it, a mountain range rises toward a bright-blue sky. In Oil, 2022, rust and plant life overtake an oil tank is parked in the middle of a forest. Vines engulf the tank. Some of the leaves have dried out and match the color of rust. In Ascend III, Green Fortress, 2022, moss and weeds grow in the grout of a stone wall. The motif of man-made objects—the truck, the oil tank, and the stone wall—succumbing to nature is not novel, but Garcia expresses it in a new light, and her use of scale is part of the novelty.
Yet Garcia’s paintings do more than evoke an existential condition. They specifically reference Cordillera, a mountainous region of the Philippines north of Manila, where an American hill station was sited in the early twentieth century—an escape from colonial Manila outposts because of the area’s cooler climate. The truck, for instance, is American military equipment, of a sort that has been appropriated by the locals to deliver agricultural products to the lowland. The works ask us to situate traces of industrial civilization against the ecology and culture of the mountains and its people. Garcia presents these abandoned objects as part of an expansive landscape—not as monuments to the colonial encounter but as structures that have been claimed and overrun by a thriving local ecology.
On the flip side, this ecology has been exploited. In the oil-on-canvas Building Mountains, 2023, heaps of gravel transform into a lifeless mountainscape. In a frame with a cement-like finish, the work provides a counterpoint to the thriving forests and mountains in the other works around it. Nearby, the diminutive Fool’s Gold, 2023, an oil painting on cement, is ensconced in a miniature smoothed-concrete obelisk. The image depicts a magnified crystalline stone, its facets giving it a deceptively enticing luster. This juxtaposition between the clearing of the mountain and the harvested fool’s gold is quite didactic in thought but stunningly depicted in this discrepant scale.
Perhaps the artist’s most successful interrogation of the relationship between nature and culture comes in Untitled Pine Tree, 2018, a suite of fifty wood-veneer panels of various sizes covering the entirety of a fifty-eight-foot-long wall. Each panel presents an oil painting of a found fragment of wood, ranging from small dried branches to cut sections of tree trunks. Whereas the other paintings work within binary frameworks of nature and culture, Untitled Pine Tree blurs the distinction between one or the other. The found wood is natural, yet it is abstracted from its context and playfully rendered on manufactured wood veneer. The binary dissipates as the labor of culture (the artistic labor, the painted thing) and the raw material from nature (found wood) become a perpetually displaced signifier for an ecosystem elsewhere.
— Carlos Quijon Jr.