Sherwin Rivera Tibayan
Sherwin Rivera Tibayan (Philippines, 1982) is a photographer based in Austin, Texas, who uses formal strategies of repetition, multiplicity, and obstruction in order to make the material, psychological, and aesthetic structures that support the ever accumulating ways we are asked to make, interpret, experience, and use photography, the subjects of his works.
His projects have gained recognition from Photolucida, the Magenta Foundation, and the Houston Center for Photography. He has participated in artist residencies with the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Triple Canopy, and A.C.R.E. In 2021 he exhibited two bodies of work in Austin: a solo show at the City of Austin’s Asian American Cultural Resource Center (“Filipino American Navy”) and as part of the The Contemporary Austin’s “Crit Group Reunion” (“Balikbayan”). In October 2023, during Filipino American History Month, he presented a solo exhibition of photographs from his series, “Into the Middle Distance,” at Spellerberg Projects in nearby Lockhart, TX
Into the Middle Distance
“Into the Middle Distance” is an ongoing body of photographic prints and arrangements that began with a personal collection of images of the American west taken in 2013 and rediscovered during months at home in 2020. Newer images join the archive and become opportunities to measure and address the distance between my feelings and beliefs—those I held dear to then and those I try to affirm now—about what happens when I attempt to photograph the American landscape, its nature, and the content of its built environment.
In trying to make sense of all these images—each of which I had only narrowly understood as individual moments where I tried to exploit photography’s capacity to aestheticize vastness, emptiness, and ruin in order to explore personal feelings of estrangement and assimilation as a first generation immigrant in the United States—I found that the pain and limitation of any one picture could be refracted, reduced, and reshaped when placed in community with others.
This process has resulted in a newfound commitment to modestly-sized photographic prints that I can make at home; a movement away from singular images towards diptychs, triptychs, and larger formal arrangements to build works; and most consequentially, to thinking about how such arrangements and connected visual affinities might help me access more expansive and collectively oriented meanings.
