My questions around the meaning of home and land, like my paintings, are tumultuous, layered, and liquiform. My collaged surfaces are a working corporal excavation into my past, a critical observance of the history of the earth that I live on, and the unrelenting violence on the multiple lands from which my ancestors come.
During the past four years and over the course of my many moves around the United States, I’ve found myself scouring neighborhood dollar stores in search of affordable fragments of home. The nostalgia of printed plastics that permeated the landscape of my Pilipinx-Jewish-American childhood continues to pervade the needs of my daily living, while my identification with these materials is inextricably linked to my memories of my intercultural, working-class household. Using mass-produced holiday-themed tablecloths, nature calendars, plastic bags, personal documents, and paint, I craft imaginary landscapes that are grounded in accumulation, personal narrative, and historical critique.
Concentrating on the subjects of home, nature, and borderlands, I see my domestic material experience as one that encompasses larger critical questions and deadly implications surrounding homeland, disposability, and diaspora here in the United States as well as on the ground in Palestine: What is a homeland and how is it constructed or deconstructed over time? What material memory does home and blood, like land and water, hold? Whose bodies belong and whose blood does the soil contain?
