Leeroy New

Leeroy New’s practice embraces a number of overlapping creative disciplines, including fashion and design, film, public art, and theater and performance. This interdisciplinary approach to artmaking has culminated in a multifaceted practice that explores socio-political themes, mythmaking, futurism, and interconnected ideas around globally resonating themes of wealth and resources. New studied at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, Manila, where he trained as a sculptor, and he continues to explore the discipline from a variety of vantage points to create a playful visual language that speaks to the social and political conditions of urban spaces in the Philippines and beyond.

New’s practice confronts the undervaluing of contemporary art and culture in the public space by introducing large-scale installations that help dissolve barriers to accessibility between conceptually driven visual art and diverse audiences. Utilizing both innovation and activism to draw attention to wealth disparity and environmental issues, New frequently employs junk materials, inspired by the creative resilience of low-income households in their re-purposing of everyday items, and often works alongside local practitioners and performers in a spirit of collaboration. His traveling performative and digital photography project Aliens of Manila (2014–) is an example of this ethos. Staged in various urban settings, the project features figures attired in New’s wearable sculpture of fantastical masks and costumes made from plastic bottles, cable cords, toys, and other upcycled paraphernalia. The costumes function as a skin or armor and provide a commentary on the liminal figures that reside on the fringes of society. The photographs are accompanied by the Instagram account @aliensofmanila, which utilizes the accessibility of the digital realm as an extension for creativity and expression.

In other site-specific, environmentally focused works, New re-negotiates how urban spaces are used and by whom. For Bakawan Floating Island Project (2016), New collaborated with longstanding colleague and urban planner Julia Nebrija to create an ecologically sustainable floating garden that traveled along Manila’s highly polluted Pasig River. In 2012 he collaborated with the local government of Paoay Sand Dunes, outside Laoag City in the northern Philippines, creating a spaceship made from junk and local bamboo, before expanding the project to build a futuristic sculpture park that transformed a discarded community space for the use and enjoyment of the public. During an experimental artist residency in Bendigo, Australia, New researched the Balete (2010–) series, inspired by the non-recyclable material used in irrigation hosing. The work employs this found readymade and weaves the flexible tubing together with plastic cable ties to resemble the Balete vine. The result is a large-scale sculptural work and alternative landscape that further explores the relationship between public space and ideas around design and the environment.

Leeroy New’s commission for HT22 brings his upcycling techniques into the current context of space exploration. Exhibited at Foster Botanical Garden, Honolulu, the main work Taklobo (2022) is an alien floral structure constructed out of discarded surfboards. Nearby, engulfing an existing trellis, is a new version of his biomorphic sculpture Balete—this iteration made from multicolored plastic junk such as water bottles. Like a mysterious vessel from outer space that has landed to transplant a colorful shape-shifting organism, New’s work sprouts on the lawn, perhaps alluding to the history of the gardens and a wider one of human exploration that saw the introduction of foreign species to newly found lands.