Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
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STATEMENT OF WORK
Deep down, I am dried fish and green mangoes.
I am sugar cane rooted in volcanic soil.
I am jasmine and chilis thriving in my grandma's garden, basking in humid tropical heat.
I am the smell of tricycle diesel fumes comingling with the smoke from a sidewalk inihaw stand.
I am a story passed down about giants and tikbalangs, living in the periphery of your vision.
I am the pig's blood that covers the rice god idols protecting its precious crops.
What is lost when you are commodified?
For years, I’ve tried to trace the faint impression of something—once a recognizable body and now a specter, a superimposed stranger. As a first-generation Filipina-American, I must understand how our historical memory and identity have been systemically erased through multiple periods of colonization. My work examines the ways this violent commodification has informed present ideations of Philippine identity and cultural value. In doing so, I follow the traces, palimpsests, and ghosts that remain. In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon argues that “to study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it.” And while “hauntings” in social realities, as Gordon describes, can call attention to what is lost, it is also the lingering impression of a repressed horror rematerializing in the present.
To explore the source of these hauntings, I create installations, sculptural objects, and two-dimensional works that utilize the commodities and materials tied to different ideations of Philippine identity. Value Studies (2021-present) incorporates various materials such as traditional Philippine handicrafts, historical textiles, exported goods, human hair, and tropical fruits to interrogate the relationships between economic value and cultural narration. Out of these materials, ghosts materialize into earthly forms: the translucent uniforms of invisible laborers float in the space of the gallery; the flags of spectral nations dangle from the ceiling; brooms of human hair hang anonymously. They appear as visitations and apparitions, yet they reflect contemporary horrors.