I use photography to negotiate with inheritance: familial, cultural, decolonial, and ancestral.
My practice is rooted in Filipino futurism and operates retrocausally. The future self looks back.
The archive reaches forward. Working through counter-archive, I treat the photographic object
as talismanic: charged with ancestral presence.
These works move across three scales of inheritance: the self, the mother, our nation.
Pagkakatanda / As I Recollect the Past (2022) is a triple-exposure self-portrait shaped by
temporal collapse. Inspired by Chris Marker’s La Jetée, I place myself as the traveler — a future
self returning to witness a past self at the threshold of family immigration. My eyes are closed,
not in absence but in interiority, holding the psychological landscape of what was lost, what was
carried, and what is still becoming. The layered face is not singular but multiple: who I was, who
I am becoming, and everything displaced in between.
Yolanda (1993) turns outward toward land. A family archive photograph of my immigrant mother
seated at Glacier Point, Half Dome rising behind her, is housed within a blush agate frame. She
sits on her own terms inside one of the most photographed landscapes in American history. The
agate is not decorative. It is earth holding earth — a gesture of respect for Awahnichi and
Southern Sierra Miwok land. Where Ansel Adams commanded the landscape with a large
format camera, my mother simply sat. That too is a form of sovereignty.
Panaginip ng Amerika / An American Dream (2023) reconstructs the American flag from 24
Instax film scans — prints arranged into formation then dragged across the flatbed during
exposure, creating the illusion of a waving flag. Personal photographs of life in Northern
California as a Filipino immigrant living within the natural and man-made American landscape.
Each photograph becomes a fragment, a portal, a living record. In conversation with Robert
Frank's The Americans and Ronald Takaki's A Larger Memory, the work does not dismantle the
dream but holds it open for examination.
This counter-archival practice extends into time-based work. Flora (2022) is composed from
35mm photographs my mother made in her 20s in the Philippines before immigrating to America
— laid across a flatbed scanner, overlapping and partially concealed, some images duplicated,
others lost beneath the surface of the scan. The gesture enacts what memory itself does: reveal
and obscure simultaneously. A life before migration becomes visible and irretrievable at once.
Jimi’s Prayer (22:22, 2026) is a visual compilation where looking becomes a form of prayer.
The land holds memory. So do we. These works are navigation — through the Unreality States
of America, toward ancestral tending. For the revolutionary thinkers, the dreamers, the faithful,
the graceful, the tragic & the classic.
I am a Filipino American artist based in Oakland. I hold a BFA in Photography with High
Distinction and a minor in Literature from California College of the Arts (2023). I was selected as
a 2026 AVA Lab artist at Kearny Street Workshop. My first solo exhibition, Temple of the Filipinx
Diaspora, was presented at Bituin Studio in San Francisco (2025–2026).