My visual language is born out of the common domestic landscape and the elements within those spaces that express a specific emotional resonance for/to/on me. Bodies, household objects, food, and nature all fuse together inside the composition to emphasize the complexity and interdependence of objects, all of which form the subjective experience I call reality. It is through the use of a vast array of color in the two-dimensional plane of tapestry that the boundaries of these forms become increasingly entangled.

 My current practice uses discarded textiles assembled to evoke personal, ancestral, and cultural memory as a form of sustenance and resistance within the patriarchal, capitalist, white supremacist societal structures we currently live in. I choose to use castaway and discarded materials in the making of art objects to serve as a metaphor for the people and things that exist on the margins of society. Reclaiming that which has been disposed of and/or rejected and highlighting its beauty and richness helps to recenter my orbit around humanness as opposed to maleness, greed, and whiteness.

 Caught somewhere between romanticism, cynicism, and comedy, my work contemplates hubris, humility, and our human tendency to view the world through hierarchical structures. Set in my rural childhood town, these paintings explore the strange yet familiar intersections between the manmade and the organic, where the desire to contain, control, and optimize seems at odds with an inherent appreciation and yearning for the natural. And with these works, I seek to encourage a championing of humility over ego.

 Drawing from the carnivalesque, absurd realities of contemporary life, my work creates narratives that recenter the female body within a parody of art history and popular culture. These new narratives challenge historical ideas around womanhood, self-image, and feminine power.

 My work invites the audience into a surreal world. The sculptures are an exploration of humans’ relationship to nonhuman objects and systems that they encounter and interrupt each day. These works and systems become an aspect, as well as extension, of the architecture that the audience can interact with. I use the aesthetic values of the sculptures—like movement, color, shape, and site—to play with how the audience perceives the work and the site.

 Understanding the construct of race, I make work that challenges biased notions by shifting the focus from skin color towards the individual. The subjects are young, emphasizing the attitude of keeping the same energy. My work explores the idea of Black people who are not concerned with the opinion of others. It focuses on the subject, their feelings, and puts them in the forefront. I’m interested in presenting people frankly and honestly, while the navigation of the white gaze always reduces the subject to the audience member’s expectations.

 I am interested in the fork as my protagonist—a time-traveling, genre-bending character grounded in the familiarity of the domestic. For me, the fork represents a sort of shamaness who has the ability to travel through time and space—bearing witness to the evolution and the folly of humankind. As a symbol of both nurture and control, the fork’s pliability questions the hierarchies of value that we have placed on the ideas of “civilized” and “uncivilized,” “domestic” and “wild.” The fork is sometimes bound or entangled, and sometimes free and liberated.

Traces of us linger in the physical world, even in our absence. There is an evocative nature to domestic objects and spaces; items within homes hold the residual energy of lives once lived after those people are gone. My work depicts ordinary objects from living rooms that hold the remaining radiance and tenderness of the departed.

 I am a storyteller who uses the language of painting. I paint surrealist scenes featuring ambiguous, physically impossible figure/landscape relationships to explore existentialist themes of longing and loss. Through visual symbolism, metaphors, and magical realism, I investigate the ways in which exterior landscapes become projections of both the viewer’s and my own psychological states. My latest work combines personal and art historical allegories with enigmatic narratives to create fragmented and uncanny dreamscapes. Using

 I paint my personal and familial mythology. Working from memory, family photos, and observation, my pictures are diaristic and deal with the construction of identity, the Filipino American experience, and contemporary life in the USA. I populate the environments with traces of my disparate experiences, allowing them to conflict and converse to express a specific hybridity, building a mosaic with the remnants of cultural collisions.