Artist Statement:  The piece "Nanay Mountain" is an exploration of the idea of myth and landscape meeting personal history. A portrait of my mom is in the background. Superimposed on her face are topographic lines, suggesting that some recognition of her in my experience has to do with geography. On a surface level, this juxtaposition plays with the idea of mapping. On a deeper level, this has to do with the immigrant experience of journeying and rootedness or loss thereof. Text of a poem that my dad wrote about my mom decades ago in the Philippines, in Tagalog and in English, spirals around the picture, traversing the geography, following the topography the way a person walking a mountain would travel. Finally, a cloudscape partially obscures the image, giving it a sense of mystery. Taken altogether, what I would like the viewer to take from this piece is a multifold complex of what makes a person, in this case both my parents, what they are, and how I, and they, take in their own existential significance.

 

Artist Bio:  I was an artist from an early age, and growing up in the Philippines, I was heavily influenced by the forces of culture, indigenous, colonial, modern and traditional, that I saw around me. My family immigrated to the U.S. and I studied Printmaking. My work has been influenced by Mexican social realists, folk artists and Pacific Northwest mystics, among others. My work has been exhibited mostly in the Pacific Northwest, but it has also been exhibited in other U.S. cities, including Chicago, Phoenix, Grosse Point and St. Louis (upcoming).