Statement

Drawing from my childhood emigration from the Philippines and my Adventist upbringing, I question the role images have played in shaping my notions of idealism, belonging, and citizenship. Creating artist books and installations, I rework found materials, including print media, family and public archives, and biblical illustrations, through the unfaithful process of photographic reproduction. By manipulating context, I imagine alternate realities, posit autonomous forms of representation, and redefine personal values.

My early years in the U.S. and the experiences of alienation I felt were informed by television shows, movies, and nostalgic depictions of American life in popular culture, all of which largely omitted Asian-American perspectives. Reconstituting a range of imagery from Normal Rockwell paintings to government records, to Christian iconography, I respond to these forms of visual “instruction” through strategies of appropriation, staging, and digital collage. Often intertwined with these media works are prints and ephemera from my family archive. These interventions infuse intimate and human 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 often binary languages used by visual systems—social, political, and religious—to shape perception, mold behavior, and influence the way we navigate through the world. My relationship to these images is one that is constantly shifting and being clarified through 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, 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

PDF