“A Diver’s Tale” is a solo exhibition featuring Mike Garcia is exhibited from September 05– 30, 2022 at the NCCA Gallery.

As factures of memories, motives, and intents, contemporary artist Mike Garcia’s pieces for A Diver’s Tale at the NCCA Gallery in September 2022 are synaptic relays of sums and parts. The viscous visual amalgams gestured through oil, ink, graphite, and other markers are teeming with transfixions between figurative and non-figurative realms. Mike introduces us to his version of El Nido, Palawan —the place still being a common synecdoche of our nation-state for tropical beauty, rest, and biodiversity.  Mike’s works hold a promise, as they are products that the artist wills to matter, to exist: We as viewers have the ability to change viewpoints if we are willing. A Diver’s Tale is presented as a way to keep remembrances, featuring a protagonist based on the artist’s father who, like the former, loved the world of water. As the artist is a father himself and also an art teacher, Mike’s works relay a calm yet steady confidence: His explorations of forms, contexts, and languages are nonetheless the evidence of the regenerative expansion and  conscious refinement of his art practice. 

The collection in A Diver’s Tale is a manifest of a range of styles, techniques, and roots that the artist consciously embraces. The ensemble  is an exercise to return to origins (whether filial, spiritual, artistic, or of the labor of hands, mind, and heart), as a means to profess a stance borne from a particular artistic praxis: Artists perform, create, and exist so that their experiences, imprints, and objects that represent the contemporaneity of moments and relationships, in their impermanences, complexities, and transversalities, can help a person or a community navigate through the uncertainty and ambiguity of thoughts, aspirations, and changes that flow constantly and abundantly in the sea of humanity. 

Mike Garcia (b. 1983) is a Filipino contemporary visual artist, art teacher, and creative based in Palawan. He completed the undergraduate Fine Arts program of the University of Santo Tomas in 2006 and pursued freelance and corporate jobs in the creative, design, and advertising fields accomplishing projects through traditional and digital art processes. He was an Alagad ng Sining Awardee in Visual Arts of the Ani ng Sining program of the NCCA and the Palawan provincial government in 2020, one of the 10 finalists in the Don Papa Rum competition of Art Fair Philippines in