19/06/2026
Growth, it seems, is not a clear ascent but a negotiation, as the artist learns how to be gentler with herself while remaining accountable for the choices she makes. What emerges are rhythms of doubt, care, exhaustion, and perseverance. Familial obligations, bills, chores, and the demands of adulthood recur with stubborn regularity, often unbearably so, yet they become the raw matter of the exhibition. Painting and collage offer a way of staying with these rhythms long enough for meaning to take shape, accompanied by the occasional appearance of mischievous Prussian-blue angels.
A beach memory anchors the exhibition: a child learning to swim, suspended between confidence and fear. Around it, cyanotype traces of dried flowers linger like evidence of touch and time, transforming memory into surface and boundaries into something porous and negotiable. A familiar figure bears witness in Darling/Clementine, embedded within a private world that is continually assembled and reassembled. Domestic fragments and fading materials gather around this presence, suggesting a life shaped not by linear narrative but by accumulation and return. St. Anthony de Padua, patron of lost things, enters as a quiet devotional anchor in Lost and Found. From a sense of untetheredness emerges a softer recognition of self: still in flux, still negotiating inherited Catholic discipline, where grace, blessing, and absolution from guilt remain ongoing pursuits rather than settled states.
The everyday is never merely background. Through attentive looking, ordinary experiences acquire unexpected weight. Personal idols and sources of inspiration intermingle with lived experience: fangirling over the spectacle of live professional wrestling while recalling lessons from Nacho Libre; reading Didion, Bachelard, and Murakami; wondering about Picasso's enduring force; listening to Adele; and sifting through photographs of candles lit in Manaoag Church, sampaguita leis, and freshly blooming flowers bathed in hazy light.
Strangely, Un/familiar is on view until June 27.
