Faculty of Art

Sculpture/Installation

Shawn Vieron

Jumper Practice, Borrowed Air

Basketball becomes a framework for tracing the presence of the sport in Filipino cultural identities. As a Canadian-born Filipino, my engagement with basketball led me to consider its significance across Filipino communities, a history that extends back to its introduction during the American colonial period. Invented by Canadian educator James Naismith, basketball travelled across the Philippine archipelago through colonial infrastructures, including education systems and U.S. military presence.Jumper Practice, Borrowed Air reflects on this entanglement of sport, empire, and cultural transmission. How do gestures of leisure—dribbling, passing, shooting—carry longer histories of conquest, influence, and adaptation? The inclusion of ghillie camouflage, a material historically used to conceal the body within military environments, introduces a logic of stealth into the work, where visibility and concealment operate alongside play. Jumper Practice, Borrowed Air revisits basketball as a material trace of colonial encounter, where cultural identity emerges through negotiation between forces of domination and the practices of those who inherit and transform them.

“documentation: Loanne II Tran”