This work is part of Maria Taniguchi’s main body of work—a series of massive canvases with hand-painted black bricks arranged on top of one another, representing time, labour and scale. The hierarchical structure appears to look uniform, but a closer look shows differences in the sizes of the cell-like substructures that make up a biological organism—much like how a society comprises individual parts.

It underestimates the importance of man as a primary unit or cell and falls in the trap of believing that history progresses in a linear manner. Taniguchi disrupts this view by creating these canvases, which are untitled and unnumbered, symbolic of the majority of labour class members in Philippines.

By creating these untitled and unnumbered canvases, Maria disrupts the understanding of seemingly uniform and hierarchical structures, bringing to light the reality of the majority of labour class members in the Philippines. These labour-intensive brick paintings tell the history of the landless labourers, labouring under post-colonial socio-economic structures that alienate them from the highly fertile Filipino lands they cultivate. Maria explores the contentious relationship between fragments and entity, individual and the social.

Maria’s brick paintings lean against a wall, occupying space in a way a painting usually doesn’t. Posing as sculptures, they challenge the binaries in our ways of seeing and evoke the question—who gets to take up space and who is sidelined?