Statement

Drawing from my experiences as a first-generation Filipino-American and my Adventist upbringing, I question the role images have played in shaping my notions of idealism, belonging, and citizenship. I use materials from my childhood—including popular media, family and public archives, and biblical illustrations—reworking them through the unfaithful process of photographic reproduction. These experiments take the form of artist books and installations where they come into dialogue with my own photographs. In manipulating the surfaces, boundaries, and contexts of images, I create alternate realities, representations, and values.

My early experiences in the U.S. in the ‘90s and early 2000s and the alienation I felt were shaped by television shows, movies, and nostalgic depictions of American life in popular culture, all of which largely omitted Asian-American perspectives. Reanimating a range of imagery from Normal Rockwell paintings to government surveillance records, to Christian iconography, I respond to these forms of visual “instruction” through strategies of appropriation, photographic staging, and digital collage. Occasionally intertwined with these media are prints and ephemera from my family archive, introducing intimate and specific narratives into the flattened or affectless depictions of American idealism that I encountered growing up in the U.S.

I am interested in reframing the universal and binary languages upheld by visual systems—social, political, and religious—that shape historical memory, perception, behavior, and influence the way we navigate through the world. My relationship to these images is one that is constantly shifting and further complicated by the transformative apparatus of the camera.

Biography

Ryan Frigillana (b. Iligan City, Philippines) is a lens-based artist working between Long Island, New York, and Southaven, Mississippi. Drawing from his Adventist roots and an upbringing shaped by migration, he approaches photography as a form of evidence, allegory, and prayer: as record, symbol, and confession.

His work has been exhibited at Silver Eye Center for Photography, Light Work, Blue Sky Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, Houston Center for Photography, and Candela Photographic Arts, among others, and has appeared in Aperture, The New Yorker, Lenscratch, Der Greif, PhMuseum, Booooooom, Humble Arts Foundation, and publications by Atlanta Center for Photography. He is a recipient of the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Photography (2025), the JGS Fellowship for Photography (2025, 2021), the Penumbra Workspace Program (2024), the Aperture & Google Creator Labs Photo Fund (2023), the En Foco Photography Fellowship (2023), and the Penumbra Foundation Risograph Print & Publication Residency (2021).

CV

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