Baker Artist Portfolios

I am a Filipina-American artist living in Baltimore, MD. My concept and research-driven work explore the entanglements of diasporic Philippine identity through sculptural objects and installations.

My current body of work, Value Studies, is a series of sculptural objects, installations, and digital media that use the language of material histories intrinsically linked to colonial economies, national identity, and personal memories of home. The series attempts to articulate the embodied experience of generations of erasure through colonial commodification and its direct correlation with collective perceptions of cultural and human value through the lens of Filipino (trans)national identity. With these works, I explore a main question: “What is lost when you are commodified?”

To explore the complex histories and entanglements stemming from these queries, I create installations, sculptural objects, and two-dimensional works that utilize the language of material histories and commodities tied to different ideations of Philippine identity. Value Studies (2021-present) incorporates various materials such as traditional Philippine handicrafts, readymade objects, historical textiles, human hair, and tropical fruits to interrogate the relationships between value and cultural narration. I use the term “studies'' in the same way that artist Abbas Akhavan describes his works as studies. Nothing is quite finished and everything has the potential to turn into something else. In exploring the complicated nuances and ever-changing nature of identity politics and its many facets, I need to be able to view each piece as distinct to a certain time and place and partially representative of an ongoing whole.