Counter is a font that begins with the lettering found on the 1898 República Filipina one-peso note. The note was produced during the brief First Philippine Republic, immediately before American occupation introduced a new visual language of currency modeled after the American dollar. The project begins with this moment of substitution and asks what might have happened if this aesthetic lineage had been allowed to continue developing alongside the forms of modernism that followed.
The original characters are expanded into a complete font and tested through applications, aesthetics, and methodologies commonly found in contemporary graphic design that were allowed to develop and mature over decades.
Buying Back Stolen Goods investigates the conditions under which institutional authority begins to fracture. Colonial histories, speeches, legislation, and state propaganda are positioned as the publication’s primary text, retaining the structural authority historically granted to the colonial archive. Around this text, a second editorial system accumulates: footnotes, marginalia, scholarship, activism, popular culture, contemporary implications, and editorial observations occupy the same pages while operating through their own grid and organizational logic.
Classification as Desire Generator begins with a photographed body processed into computational description: color channels, point-cloud coordinates, and vertex data. The figure is color-blocked in the manner of image segmentation, the process through which machine vision divides an image into discrete regions for classification. What renders the body classifiable also renders the print chromatic, luminous, and deliberately seductive.
When a viewer approaches the work, they are photographed and processed through the same system, becoming the next image. The work on view already contains the hand of a captured viewer, establishing a continuous loop between classification, attraction, and the bodies drawn toward it.
Welcome Committee begins with synecdoche, the relationship in which a part can stand for a whole and a whole for its parts, and the Filipino concept of Kapwa, which understands the self as relational and constituted through others.
The composition brings these ideas together through abstract fragments that retain their individual forms while simultaneously constructing a larger whole. No form is assigned a specific cultural or geographic identity. Translated into woven jacquard, the relationship becomes physical: individual shapes become interdependent threads, and the image and its surface are produced simultaneously as a single textile.
Each Other, Another is a video that explores double estrangement: experiencing the Philippines from a distance while simultaneously experiencing America from inside it and at a distance from it. The Philippines reaches me through photographs, family stories, archives, books, screens, objects, inherited memories, and other people’s experiences. America is physically present, but its familiarity is complicated by conditions of otherness.
Archival photographs from the Philippines are populated with people, while photographs I made across the United States are largely empty, bringing inherited and lived images into the same fragmented sequence.