SAMPLE IMAGES

Hardness Is Not the Absence of Emotion, is an installation made from abstracted, governmental buildings in NY and Manila, PH, that have histories of war and violence. All of the architectures referenced have been influenced by “The City Beautiful Movement,” an American urban-planning movement at the turn of the 20th century. The movement believed that beautiful design could inspire “moral and civic virtue,” and eliminate “social ills.” It heavily references architecture from Europe, particularly Beaux-Arts architecture. Beaux-Arts was seen as rational, symmetrical, and ordered. I combined Beaux-Arts architectures inspired by this movement from spaces in Manhattan and Manila that have histories of military presence, war, and migration. I took fragments of these architectures to create a layered archway that visitors can walk through and around. The installation’s form is primarily inspired by deconstructing The Dewy Arch, a temporary triumphal archway that was built in Madison Square after the Spanish-American War, when the Philippines became a colony of the US. The patterns on the various fabrics reference digitized abstracted architectures from other spaces with similar histories and design origins. The title of the piece, “Hardness is Not the Absence of Emotion..." references a quote from Sara Ahmed’s text “The Cultural Politics of Emotion,” where she unpacks the gendered and socialized assumptions around the hierarchy between thought/reason and emotion.

At what point does the world unfold? is a site specific installation on the Arts Quad at Cornell University for the Cornell Biennial. I took the main elements of Goldwin Smith Hall’s Beaux Arts architecture and individually abstracted and fabricated them to scale - the 4 columns, the roof, 3 of the windows, and 3 of the arched doorways. The installation goes across part of the Arts Quad, partially tied to trees, and partially rooted into the ground. Each architectural element is made of brightly colored textiles, with printed floral patterns and ornamentation. The plant and flower images refer to local species in the landscape prior to Cornell’s presence. I am interested in creating an installation that reorients the viewer’s assumptions of history through visual strategies of disrupting the familiar. The Arts Quad is a central hub at Cornell, housing the Arts and Sciences. It is also where Cornell was first built. The central building of the Arts Quad, Goldwin Smith Hall, is a neoclassical building named after a former professor who has since been called out as holding racist and misogynist beliefs. As it currently stands, the visual orientation signals empire, whiteness, maleness. I am interested in deconstructing the authoritative architectural elements and transforming them into new fantastical forms that disrupt their lineage. The work calls into question the histories and spaces prior to the institution, as well as questioning how spaces welcome certain bodies while excluding others. The title comes from a line from Sara Ahmed’s text A Phenomenology of Whiteness as she speaks about the phenomenological and racial relationship between bodies and their surroundings.

This installation is inspired by research of the first “Chinatown,” Binondo, which came to existence in the late 16th century in Manila because of the Spanish Empire. It was a means to control, contain and separate the Chinese population. The installation merges the architecture and textiles from Filipino, Chinese and Spanish lineages. I became interested in thinking through, “What if what was meant to be kept outside the walls of the Spanish Empire, seeped in, and what was meant to be kept inside, seeped out?” The architectural sculptures reference Intramuros, the Spanish Empire, as well as Bindondo. Surrounding the architectures are translucent pink curtains with organic shapes, which are made up of zoomed in, digitized fragments of the photos of the architectures, when placed in Illustrator. The walls, floor and parts of the sculptures are also covered in textile images that are a combination of Spanish, Chinese, and Filipino carpets, garments, and tapestries. Inside and around the sculptures are sounds of rumblings from volcanoes, humming, ringing from bowls bought in NYC’s Chinatown, synthesizers and whispering voices reading from a fragmented colonial text. The sound was created in collaboration with Finnish musician Lau Nau.

A cenotaph refers to a monument commemorating people buried elsewhere. This installation was at the Oakland Cemetery in Altanta, GA. It was a monument commemorating the 872 probable unmarked burials in the African-American section that were discovered in 2016 and are still being uncovered and identified. It was placed in a Magnolia Tree next to the "Lion of the Confederacy '', a preexisting sculpture already constructed to commemorate the unknown confederate dead. Each of the fabric pieces in the installation is an abstracted red obelisk. The obelisk is the main structure in the Confederate section.

The Edge of Dwelling is an immersive, reimagined city made from printed and collaged photos of historical ruins, churches, schools, government buildings, and estates, most of which have roots in neoclassical design. The original images are sourced from American colonial texts documenting the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Mixed within these photos are images of buildings from Wave Hill (the cultural center in the Bronx where this was shown) that have similar architectural facades. A 3-channel soundscape of field recordings are hidden inside the installation, which was created in collaboration with Finnish musician Lau Nau. When creating this installation, I was interested in creating a kaleidoscopic site of facades and replicas that played with perspective and one’s sense of orientation. I wanted to use visual and sensorial strategies of disorientation to comment on how architectures of Empire support hegemony and how colonial photography distorts and abstracts how we remember the past.

Abyssal is an immersive installation made out of hand woven silk nets and collected debris from abandoned beaches. I was inspired by images of purse seine fishing nets used in the Philippines. I wanted to create a fictional space that alluded to the bottom of the ocean. Symbolically, the ocean is the connective tissue between ‘here’ (NY) and ‘there’ (the Philippines), two spaces that have connoted ‘home’ to me, yet neither being a complete cultural anchor. The ocean also symbolizes a mythological dimension of the unknown, where things disappear, are preserved, and transform. I reimagined my process of mining personal and historical narratives through the idea of casting wide nets into the deepest parts of the ocean. The space also has a soundscape coming from speakers hidden inside of the nets. In collaboration with Or Zublasky, I created fragmented audio vignettes. The audio is divided into 6 channels. The sound is compiled from interviews from my Lola (grandmother), and her 4 children around their experiences of moving from the Philippines to the US. When you enter, you can hear only murmuring. Fragments of the stories can be heard when you step closer to one of the nets. The lights in the space were programmed to slowly dim on and off throughout the duration of the exhibition, so that it gave the illusion of refracted light on water.

This piece is made of scanned and printed images from American colonial texts of the Philippines, made at the turn of the 20th century, as well as from news clips showing arrests and massacres from President Duterte’s violent administration. The images are collaged, painted, cut into strips and hung from the 27 foot ceiling. The patterning and form of the hanging strips are inspired by lianas, woody climbing vines, from rainforests in Luzon, Philippines as well as military camouflage canopies. When making this soft paper sculpture, I was thinking about the relationship between the Filipino landscape, colonial and contemporary wars, and cultural memory. The sculpture is an abstracted fragment of the tropics, archiving the trauma of the past and present. I began to see the color red not just as blood, but also as a color of potency, danger, and agency. It is inspired by brightly colored poisonous animals, such as poison dart frogs, whose colors ward off predators by signalling toxicity. The tropics bear witness and remember all histories, but are not passive recipients. In this piece, the tropics are sentient, powerful and protective.

the rain from dreams or from breaths is an intersection of my  body with reimagined ancient coastal caves from Southeast Asia. I imagine the installation as a sacred, boundless space, where sky, water, and land undulate and connect, where ecosystems and bodies regenerate infinitely, and where passageways are carved to afterlives. All of the sculptures are made from recycled materials, some from my family and home, others found objects. Hanging from the ceiling is a pink and magenta textile canopy. The canopy has pink, green, blue, and black tendrils torn from cut clothing and secondhand cloth, as well as hanging beads, buttons, and sequins. On the floor of the gallery, both under and around the canopy, are turquoise, flat floor works reminiscent of islands. Each of these curved terrains are made from used astroturf, and are abundantly adorned. On and around these terrains are various green and blue figurative sculptural vessels. Each one aligns with the shape or dimensions of one of my body parts. Along the walls are two dimensional paper and fabric works embellished with beads, gems, and my hair. The wall works refer to constellations that can be seen from the sky in the Philippines, constellations that were used for celestial navigation in ancient wayfaring.

This ceramic vessel is part of a series of ceramics that are inspired by burial jars from ancient caves throughout the Philippines. Within this series, I imagine these anthropomorphic vessels to have come from a volcanic eruption. They are molten rock that have emerged from a phenomenal explosion. In their molten form they are unfixed, uncategorizable bodies that physicalize past and present worlds. They are porous containers that shape shift from human to animal to plant. Each ceramic work has one or two faces which are either my own or of my family members. Each ceramic work has an opening within it. Each work also has either animal characteristics from mythologies within Southeast Asia and/or plant form inspired by the okir, a precolonial plant motif found in designs on objects throughout the Philippines. Some of the vessels have imprints from my father and Lola’s embroidered piña fabric garments.