Cruz’s practice 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 recent works have been informed by his shamanic practice as an Albularyo, a tradition rooted in Filipino mysticism.
Cruz studied at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in Diliman, Quezon City and completed his undergraduate degree from Emily Carr University of Art + Design after immigrating to Canada. He received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Guelph in 2016. 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. Cruz is the co-director of the Kamias Triennial with curator Karie Liao, co-curator of Ben Flores Fan Club Collective with Christian Vistan and collaborator at Boring Earth with Laila Fox.
patrickcruzinfo@gmail.com