Info
Artist statement I
From 2012 to 2019, this site existed specifically as an artist portfolio and focused on completed and current works, exhibition documentation, and press. But beginning in 2020, I’d like to make this site a little less of a portfolio of finished works for visitors. The artworks and documentation will still hang out, but may be interrupted and undermined with proposals, experiments, wrong avenues, and works in progress. I’d also like to add notes and downloads and further context to the projects and subjects and tangents that have fascinated and troubled me over the years.
Some of the subjects and tangents may include presumed ideas and feelings I can’t seem to shake, about visual art and its relationship(s) to: labor, making some money, ethics, higher education, hyper-professionalization, consolation, writing, what’s the point anyway-isms, debt, privilege, expectations, identity, friendship, competition, audience, obscurity, accessibility, privacy, consumption, material culture, having fun, etc.
Artist Statement II
My projects usually begin when I'm caught off guard and surprised to catch a glimpse of some mechanism, structure, or practice that directs or informs the way we might admire, create, discover, and distribute reproducible images. This is usually a disappointing encounter. But some optimistic, school-learned part of me begins to think that asking questions, collecting information, experimenting with styles, and looking for patterns and repetitions will reveal to me why this is the world and not another.
This is especially true with tools. Whether it’s a histogram or color checker or an index, I like trying to push and test their expressive capacities beyond measurement and towards metaphor. More often, however, what remains and charms me most when my beliefs and efforts have left are a few hard-won feelings for a picture I’ve made about a misunderstanding.
In each case, I try to recognize and work alongside the uneasy truth that looking, taking, making, manipulating, accumulating and discarding photographs and images are each activities full of conflict and inequality, but also responsibility and splendor.
Artist statement III
Sherwin Rivera Tibayan (Philippines, 1982) is an art photographer based in Austin, Texas, who uses formal strategies of repetition, multiplicity, obstruction, and visual ambiguity in order to re-present the various technological structures, tools, and supports that make up and sustain our personal and official photo-documentary histories. In doing so—again and again and again—he poses discrete challenges to ideas of inevitability, monumentality, and display, hoping to make room for the possibility of imaginary counter-narratives and small expansions in meaning.
Artist Statement IV
sherwin.r.tibayan[at]gmail.com