“Welcome to the Taro Dome”

Astria Suparak
Cotton prints, artificial fruits, sandbags, sand, and photo backdrop kits, approximately 15.5 x 10.5 x 13.5 feet
2026
Commissioned by San Francisco Arts Commission

Description
Exhibitions
Related #Tropicsss works

“In this towering installation, Astria Suparak constructs a sprawling set shaped by centuries of imperial fantasy. The title invokes a lineage of imagined enclosures—from Romantic visions of the ‘pleasure dome’ to later pop-cultural sites of spectacle and threat. Most notably, it echoes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (1797), which casts the East as a dreamlike terrain of power, sensuality, and excess.

Drawing on Dutch still-life painting, naturalist illustration, expedition imagery, imperial propaganda, and commercial packaging, Suparak composites hundreds of flora and fauna into layered fabric banners. Snakes coil around prey; a throng of brightly feathered birds erupts into flight above, while fanciful fruits swell into bloated cornucopias. Stripped from their original contexts, these images accumulate into ornamental fields rather than rational landscapes.

The installation exposes how Enlightenment-era ambitions to catalog and ‘capture’ nature collapse into spectacle and excess. Extending Suparak’s research and lecture-performances, this work presents the tropics beyond geography, where they function as a recirculating visual system—one endlessly recomposited to sustain fantasy at overlapping, monumental scales.” – Matthew Villar Miranda, curator, Dream Jungle

This work is part of Astria Suparak’s Tropicsss series.

Detail of “Welcome to the Taro Dome,” Astria Suparak, in “Dream Jungle, San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery, 2026. Photo: Aaron Wojack

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“Dream Jungle” poster, San Francisco Arts Commission gallery, 2026

EXHIBITIONS

San Francisco Arts Commission, Main Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Dream Jungle
Jan. 29–May 2, 2026

The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Main Gallery is excited to present Dream Jungle. This group exhibition curated by Matthew Villar Miranda, features new commissions and key loans by Alexa Burrell a.k.a. LEXAGON, adrian clutario, Al-An deSouza, Astria Suparak, and Carlos Villa, along with archival holdings from The Center for the Study of the Study of the Tasaday and the Jessica Hagedorn Papers at The Bancroft Library. Together the exhibition features artists who wield elements of performance to explore counter-ethnographies of the tropics, subverting colonial notions of the other.

Taking its title from Jessica Hagedorn’s 2003 novel, the exhibition explores the tangle of truth and artifice behind imperial representation. In the novel, Hagedorn stages two performances in the Philippine jungle: the media spectacle of a fabricated “Stone Age” tribe and the filming of a Hollywood Vietnam War epic. Drawing from this framework, Dream Jungle foregrounds the tropics as a zone of psychic and historical projection—where the colonized land and body are scripted, cast, and costumed for imperial consumption.

Through installation, video, literature, and archival assemblage, the artists enact what Miranda calls “tropical counter-ethnographies”: practices that seize the tropes of scripting, scoring, costuming, drag, fabrication, fore- and backgrounding, character building, scene-setting, and tableau to unsettle colonial modes of capture.

“Dream Jungle pays homage to Jessica Hagedorn’s daring vision and celebrates artists who continue to wield performance and the imagined tropics as a lush, dallying, and biting evasion of colonial capture,” said exhibition curator Matthew Villar Miranda. “Through staged selves and reanimated mythologies, these artists grow our humid notions of our shifting world. They gesture, cast spells, and prod the ever-evolving notions of identity, history, and place. In a time where the discernment between reality and illusion, authenticity and deep fakes, technology and primitivity, is increasingly wrought, porous, and overgrown, the exhibition and its artists offer performance beyond illusory spectacle; instead, they insist on its truths as a necessary and fecund mode of freedom, insurgence, and revelrous self-discovery.”

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