England Hidalgo At The Ramp Gallery

Focusing on the remnants of U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines, England Hidalgo explores the relationship between anthropology and colonialism. His work interrogates U.S. colonial power and reappropriates the colonial gaze to subvert it. By utilizing colonial visual archive materials and found objects, Hidalgo creates prints, drawings, stereographs, sculptures, and installations that defamiliarizes these artifacts, and allows us to reflect on the racist and colonialist practices that pervaded anthropology. The exhibition "_How Not to Gaze at the Colonial Archive_," consists of laser ink prints on dried polymer emulsion, depicting images from the gaze of two colonizers of the Philippines. The prints are portraits of different people from the islands of the Philippines from the late 16th century as documented by the Spaniards in the Boxer Codex, and photographs of people from the same islands as documented by American zoologist Dean C. Worcester 300 years later. The work asks, how can people be protected from colonial reach? From these prints, the people have been removed from the picture to protect them from colonial power and the colonial gaze.