I’m a Filipino-American artist and educator, born and raised in Los Angeles and living and working on Lenapehoking in Brooklyn. I make paintings and drawings using liquid acrylic pigments, gouache, and graphite, portraying the earthly and otherworldly where figures populate and merge with the settings they inhabit. Experiences of loss have deepened my questions around how we continue to love and inhabit the world here and hereafter.
My practice explores the spiritual and ecological relationships between bodies, place, memory, and ancestry, and what becomes charged when these categories are in flux. Grounded in Philippine ways of knowing, including folklore, hilot, myth, burial practices, and food as medicine, I’m drawn to traditions that offer ways of understanding myself and the world beyond what can be empirically verified. These traditions have led me to think of painting and drawing as intuitive technologies, where what is known and what is felt can emerge through physical process, sensation, and interpretation.
My work stays open to what cannot yet be explained, making space for what I know, what I feel, and what I wish.
