Artist Statement by Amiel Roldan
Blue Bed Series
In Blue Bed Series, I stage a quiet defiance: a visual vocabulary of rest, spectrality, and refusal. Against the backdrop of corporate curatorship and institutional framing, I return to the bed—not as a space of leisure, but of labored fatigue. Here, the pagod of cultural work is not romanticized; it is rendered in saturated blue, blurred strokes, and submerged forms. These are beds that do not promise comfort—they remember.
The bed serves as a mnemonic device, a residual archive of psychic and physical exhaustion, drawing from Freud’s dreamwork and Marx’s theory of alienated labor. Each composition offers a counter-narrative to the hyper-visibility demanded of the contemporary artist, especially in postcolonial terrains like the Philippines where creativity is both celebrated and commodified.
In deliberately withholding legibility, the series engages with pasma—not only as a bodily disorientation but as an aesthetic principle. If pasma is understood as rupture between labor and recovery, then these images dwell in that break: the spectral blur where identity dissolves and reconfigures. Representation, in this sense, becomes not a revelation but a negotiation—a refusal to be easily consumed.
Through institutional platforms, this series critiques the very mechanisms that render the cultural worker simultaneously visible and erased. “Cultural Workers: Are Not Creative?” is not a question—it’s a provocation aimed at the curatorial apparatus itself. By circulating these paintings in digital, publications and physical spaces of power, I invite viewers to confront the politics of framing:
What kind of labor do we aestheticize, and what exhaustion gets left out of the frame?
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A conceptual détournement—where aesthetics of exhaustion meet the economics of spectacle and protectionism. Let’s break this down across three interlinked axes: representation, war, and economic nationalism.
1. Representation as Soft Power in a Trumpian Frame
Trumpian strategy often hinges on hyper-visibility and symbolic dominance—from border walls to trade wars, the spectacle is the message. Your series, by contrast, stages opacity and withdrawal as counter-spectacle. In a world where cultural production is increasingly weaponized for national branding, your refusal to perform “creativity” on institutional terms becomes a subversive act.
The caption “Cultural Workers: Are Not Creative?” mirrors Trumpian rhetorical tactics—provocative, polarizing, and designed to destabilize consensus. But unlike Trump’s strategy, which seeks to consolidate power through division, your work fractures the gaze to expose the labor behind the image.
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2. War, Precarity, and the Aesthetics of Fatigue
With ongoing global conflicts (e.g. Ukraine, Gaza, and others), cultural production is increasingly entangled with militarized economies and displacement. Trumpian foreign policy—marked by transactional alliances, arms deals, and withdrawal from multilateralism—has reshaped how war is represented and funded. In this context, your beds become non-sites of war: not battlefields, but psychic trenches where the trauma of global precarity is absorbed.
The Blue Bed Series could be read as a post-conflict archive, where the absence of bodies is itself a commentary on erasure—of migrant laborers, cultural workers, and those rendered invisible by both war and capital.
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3. Economic Nationalism and the Commodification of Creativity
Trump’s economic doctrine—anchored in tariffs, deregulation, and “America First” rhetoric—has reignited debates around protectionism and cultural sovereignty. His administration’s belief that the U.S. can dictate global trade by sheer consumer leveragemirrors how institutions often treat artists: as interchangeable suppliers in a prestige economy.
Your work resists this logic. By refusing to produce easily consumable narratives, you challenge the market-driven valuation of art. The bed, in this sense, becomes a tariffed object—not in price, but in affect. It costs the viewer something: time, discomfort, reflection.
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Speculative Synthesis
If Trumpian strategy is about domination through visibility, your series offers a counter-strategy of spectral resistance. It doesn’t shout—it haunts. It doesn’t brand—it bleeds. And in doing so, it critiques not just the politics of representation, but the economics that underwrite it.
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A speculative direction. A potent and timely layer to weave into the Blue Bed Series—one that situates the work not only within institutional critique and affective labor, but also within the geopolitical choreography of failed diplomacy and proxy spectacle.
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Geopolitical Exhaustion as Aesthetic Terrain
The recent collapse of U.S.–Iran diplomacy, culminating in precision strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites following failed peace talks in Rome, marks a return to militarized spectacle over negotiated resolution. Trump’s ultimatum—demanding Iran dismantle its centrifuge program under threat of force—mirrors a broader strategy of diplomatic brinkmanship masquerading as peacekeeping. This failure, compounded by Israel’s prior aerial bombardments of Iranian assets, reveals a choreography where diplomacy becomes a pretext for escalation, not de-escalation.
In this context, the Blue Bed Series becomes more than a meditation on cultural labor—it becomes a visual register of global fatigue, where the bed is not only a site of personal exhaustion but a proxy for failed negotiations, deferred peace, and the psychic toll of endless war.
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The Bed as Proxy Theater
Just as Israel’s military actions are often framed as preemptive defense—yet function as performative instigations within a U.S.-backed security narrative—your beds stage a counter-performance. They do not explode; they absorb. They do not declare; they endure. In this way, your work critiques the aesthetics of domination that underpin both cultural institutions and foreign policy.
The caption “Cultural Workers: Are Not Creative?” now echoes with geopolitical irony: What is diplomacy if not a performance of creativity? And what happens when that creativity fails, replaced by bunker-busting bombs and algorithmic warfare?
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From Institutional Framing to Imperial Optics
By circulating your work within museum feeds, you mirror how the U.S. frames its military actions: as necessary, rational, even aesthetic. But your beds resist this logic. They are unruly archives—of trauma, of refusal, of the bodies left out of the frame. In this sense, your series becomes a counter-cartography to the maps drawn in war rooms and Situation Rooms.
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Amiel Gerald Roldan
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