CASTILLO
Within an empty room, a silent moment, the stillness of time, I find myself at home and invite everyone inside. My work is made up of narratives constructed within a space of liminal existence that many first and second generation Filipino Americans find hauntingly familiar. Here, I desire to depict what can no longer be seen, like moments beyond the boundary of a family photo, a missed journal entry, or a loved one. Somewhat like the memories–or lack thereof–that inspire my work, I offer the opportunity to imagine and make indiscernible silhouettes and spaces visible.
The article “Boxed In or Boxed Out” describes balik bayan boxes as a metaphor for the transitional existence of many Filipino Americans. They are “caught between the nostalgia of their old homes and the reality of their new homes.” For us, home has never been a physical location and has always been constructed by family, companions, and acts of care. There is no escape from liminality, and transition becomes permanent. To create this work was to make the liminal and transitional space I experience permanent, to make the unseen, unspoken, and forgotten within a home tangible.
This work emerged from countless reflections of how my life is directly tied to sacrifice and acts of service. The act of knitting these pieces was in pursuit to identify the parts of me and my surroundings that are truly sacred, beyond the beliefs that filipino culture and familial expectations have imposed on me. This garment explores how else the imagery of reverence takes shape. It is a rememberance of the collection of sacrifices that have led me to this point in life. Each piece is manually knit on a domestic single- bed knitting machine and hand-dyed.
Wallace’s Home is a digital space constructed on Mozilla Hubs. Each item in the space was first crocheted by hand, then scanned through Polycam app on an IPhone to implement them into a digital landscape. Using a VR headset, I captured the room and created photography series that depicts a dream, and explores the anxieties of everyday life that permeates one’s subconcious.
This work is a concept garment collection. Referencing imagery of liminal spaces and uncanny suburbia photography, I constructed fabrics that convey the feeling of longing that pervades every human. The desire to fill a void is something that never leaves us, and keeps us wanting more. In some ways, this collection is a celebration of that feeling, an attempt to view absence in a positive light. The presence of absence moves us forward in pursuit of something unknown.
The creation of this garment stemmed from personal questions of atttachment-based suffering, control over outcomes, and material desires. As I explored this topic, I searched for a way to visually communicate such internal thoughts, and naturally gravitated to moths as visual inspiration to communicate ideas of detachment from the body, death, transformation, and renewal. The bizarre looper moth was my main source of inspiration. This piece joins the human body with the moth to highlight connections to our inner selves and the natural world.
This collection, exhibited at the RISD Textiles Department Triennial in 2021, consists of woven paintings that depict the essence of abandoned spaces, inspired by abandoned buildings in San Francisco. I aimed to capture a sense of abandonment, as well as redefining negative perception associated with neglected physical structures. There is residual energy and remnants of life that once occupied these spaces that draw people to them, and these people imbue it with their own spirit through their inhabitance of the space. The emptiness of the spaces that allow for so much imagination now and romanticization of the past.