Keeyan Suazo

Makahiya (Mimosa Pudica)
From the Alamat series (Ongoing)

Keeyan Suazo is a multidisciplinary Filipino artist based in Surrey, the unceded traditional territory of the Katzie, Semiahmoo, Kwantlen, and other Coast Salish Peoples. He is currently pursuing a BFA in Visual Arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Through drawing, sculpture, ceramics and photography, Suazo explores different narratives of transformation, transposition, and translation. In varying levels of opacity and transparency in visual storytelling, he selectively shows and obscures different elements within a scene to convey themes of intimacy, eroticism and memory. He investigates the etymological histories of words, showing their multitude of obvious and embedded hidden meanings through semiotics and symbolism built from personal, familial, and communal definitions. His works have been featured in the Flash Forward Incubator Program by the Capture Photography Festival and Magenta Foundation, Roundhouse Community Centre, Gallery 626, Massy Arts Society, and in his solo exhibition at Burrard Arts Foundation. 

Keeyan Suazo’s Makahiya (Mimosa pudica) is part of his Alamat series that dives into alamat or Filipino origin stories of plants, animals and even landmarks. For this series of work, he focuses on stories that involve humans transforming into non-human entities. The typical structure of these stories is that the main character transforms into a non-human entity that reflects their ‘key’ characteristic or encompasses a characteristic that they needed before. Through directly drawing signifiers of those non-human entities on his dermatographic skin, he presents the ‘anthrotransformic’ aspect of different alamat stories. In this way, an aspect of his body transforms into a depiction of those entities, making his body the site, the subject, and the object of these stories. 

The triptych titled Makahiya (Mimosa pudica) are photographs of skin drawings of makahiya or commonly known as shyplant or touch-me-not on different parts of the artist’s body. A synopsis of its alamat is that a mother wished for her bashful daughter, who is hiding in their garden, to be safe from intruders on their property. This wish came true, transforming her into a plant. When grazed or poked, the leaves of the makahiya close one by one. Her shyness was reflected in the folding of the plant’s leaves when touched. This project draws the connection between the defence mechanism of the shy plant and Suazo’s dermatographic skin, both of which show an “allergy” to touch. For this project, his skin becomes the substrate and the medium, and the photographs as documentation of this time-sensitive drawing on his body.