Patrick Cruz is an artist, educator, and an albularyo, also known as a faith healer. Cruz considers the role of spirituality, improvisation, intuition, and play as emancipatory tools to reify embedded colonial frameworks and ideologies in art making and collective dreaming. Cruz employs cooking, healing, meditation, divination, exorcism, and hypnosis as research methodologies to exhume and retrieve hidden knowledge. His works are informed by the intersections of clown philosophy, magic, and the occult, and their syncretic manifestations and relationships in contemporary life. Most recently, Cruz has been making works using material retrieved from past-life regressions to navigate and side-step cultural and ancestral identity.
Cruz attended Emily Carr Institute between 2006 – 2010. In 2021, he received the prestigious Thirteen Artist Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and in 2015, he won the national title in the 17th RBC Canadian Painting Competition. He is a cross-appointed Assistant Professor in Arts, Culture and Media in Studio Art at the University of Toronto Scarborough and Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, where he works with Visual Studies graduate students. He is the founder and co-director of the Kamias Triennial, along with curators Su-Ying Lee and Karie Liao, co-curator of Ben Flores Fan Club Collective with Christian Vistan, collaborator at Boring Earth with Laila Fox, and one of the 19 members of the artist-run collective the Plumb.
patrickcruzinfo@gmail.com
https://theplumb.ca/
https://www.kamiasspecialprojects.com/