BIO

Artist Bio

Jay Cabalu is a Filipino-Canadian collage artist based in Vancouver, BC. He discovered magazines and comic books at a young age after his family immigrated to Canada in 1991. As a response to mass media and capitalism, Cabalu repurposes print media to create highly meticulous collages. In subject matter ranging from pop icons, self-portrait and still life, Jay's artistic practice has evolved over the past decade as critique and correction to the failures of media's attempts to depict his everyday reality. By reappropriating the visual language of advertisements and popular culture, Jay inverts depictions of pleasure and luxury to portray a world overflowing with contradictions. Sex and violence, normalized absurdity, and beautiful chaos take form in his expansive collage universe.

Cabalu has a BFA from Kwantlen Polytechnic University and has exhibited his work since graduating in 2013. A series of self-portraits Jay created from 2017-2019 garnered the attention of international exhibitions centred on queer-Asian identity. In 2018, he exhibited with the Foundation for Asian-American Independent Media in Chicago. In the UK, Cabalu’s work was part of exhibitions with Queer Asia in 2018 and 2019, for which he gave a virtual artist talk at the British Museum. Jay has exhibited work in Vancouver with SUM Gallery and On Main Gallery in 2019 and 2020 in two pan-Asian focused showcases. His self-portrait De Los Reyes, appears on the cover of the McGill-Queens University Press publication Canadian Culinary Imaginations, which explores the role of food as multimodal media. Cabalu’s debut solo exhibition Extra, curated by Paul Wong, opened May 2022. His second solo exhibition, POP ODY$$EY, an early-career survey of works spanning 15 years, opened at Deer Lake Gallery in 2023.

Jay Cabalu’s practice gratefully takes place on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.