Stephanie Comilang at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto

Daniel Faria Gallery is pleased to present Bouquets for Paradise, Stephanie Comilang’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Stephanie Comilang’s work juxtaposes temporality, geography, and technology into objects and narratives in which the future and past become aligned, addressing diasporas, generations, survival, violence, and desire. In Bouquets for Paradise, a new series of textile works fill the room with images of the natural world. Monarch butterflies and flowers from potato, coffee, vanilla, and other plants extracted by Spanish colonizers, are machine embroidered on deconstructed denim clothing, stretched over tea-dyed canvas. These wall works surround figures shrouded in embroidered veils made from denim and piña fabric. Comilang’s embroidery methods mimic the unique vision of the monarch butterfly. Incredibly delicate and weighing less than half a gram, Monarchs in North America undertake one of the longest migrations of any insect in the world, traveling thousands of kilometres each fall to their winter destinations in central Mexico. Their eyes have six photoreceptors instead of the human three, and they view the world according to colours, perceiving a broad spectrum of sunlight and its effect on plants, flowers, and fields.

The materials used in Bouquets for Paradise all have complex histories of labour and colonial trade and exploitation. Piña, a textile made from pineapple fibres, is traditionally used in the Philippines for local fabric production after the fruit was introduced to the archipelago by the Spaniards. The embroideries on Manton de Manila recall those on Manila shawls, which originated in Guangzhou, China, and were introduced through the Spanish trade route to Manila. Denim, a uniform of labour, gains it colour from indigo, a commodity deeply rooted in the history of currency and exchange in South Asia.

Indigo is derived from the plant genus Indigofera, belonging to the bean family, comprising more than 750 species that grow in tropical climates. One of the most widely used species is the Indigofera tinctoria L., which may have originated in South Asia, and spread to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, before spreading to America. Indigo was the only natural material that people could find between the 16^th and 19^th centuries which could dye material richly and deeply blue, and the sought-after commodity became associated with a status of wealth and power. With that status, came the widespread exploitation of the people who produced it across South Asia, Southeast Asia, West Africa, and most of the Americas, with India being one of the first major centres for its production and processing in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The city of Manila (Maynilà in Filipino) translates to “where indigo is found,” named for the presence of indigo plants that grew in the area, even before indigo dye was extracted and exported in the area.

This body of work stems from a larger two-part project titled, Search for Life, commissioned by TBA21, Sharjah Art Foundation and The Vega Foundation. The first part, curated by Chus Martínez, was presented at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid from March 5 – May 26, 2024. The second, curated by Amal Khalaf, will be presented at the Sharjah Biennial, opening in February 2025. Search for Life is a totalizing large-scale film and textile installation tracing shipping routes used by Spanish conquistadors after the colonization of the Philippines.

Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Comilang will participate in the upcoming Sharjah Biennial and Hawaii Triennial, and will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada and at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, all in 2025Comilang’s collaborative exhibition with Simon Speiser Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? has been shown at the Mackenzie Gallery, Regina; Gallery TPW, Toronto; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; Silverlens, Manila; and University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane. Her work has been shown at ChertLüdde, Berlin; Silverlens, New York; Tate Modern, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Tai Kwun Gallery, Hong Kong; MOCA, Toronto; and Haus der Kunst, Munich; and can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; TBA21-Collection, Madrid; The Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany, Berlin; Musée d’art de Contemporain, Montreal; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin, among others. Comilang was the recipient of the 2019 Sobey Art Award.