Finding Elsewhere: Selected Works by Maia Cruz Palileo and Jeanne F. Jalandoni

“Finding Elsewhere: Selected Works by Maia Cruz Palileo and Jeanne F. Jalandoni” explores how these artists grapple with colonial legacies and intergenerational trauma through embodied practices in Palileo’s Kapatid (sisters) (2018) and Jalandoni’s Take Up the Brown (2018). Additionally, this study assesses how Jalandoni’s Transience (2022) transcends categorical limitations in media, place, and time as a channel of connection to the Philippines. Through the study of the work on paper Kapatid (sisters) by Filipinx American artist, Maia Cruz Palileo (they/them), I assess how Palileo embodies care within their practice. I study Kapatid (sisters) in relation to Dean Worcester’s colonial-era photography of the Philippines which Palileo references in their research. This integrated analysis determines how Palileo’s work manifests in opposition to Worcester’s imperial perspective. In my study of multimedia work Take Up the Brown (2018) by Filipina American artist Jeanne F. Jalandoni (she/her), I examine how Jalandoni embodies her own testimony of navigating historical erasure and historical recovery as a result of residual imperial subjugation. I deconstruct Jalandoni’s usage of Louis Dalrymple’s propaganda cartoon, School Begins (1899), and its close association with the Rudyard Kipling poem, “The White Man’s Burden” (1899). By historically contextualizing her archival references, I examine how Jalandoni’s visual testimony of colonial history is made tangible for viewers. In the second section of my study, I examine Jalandoni’s oil and textile work, Transience (2022) to explore how Jalandoni labors towards a connection with her ancestral homeland while solidifying her own bi-cultural identity as a Filipina American. I delve into Jalandoni’s engagement with family oral history, family photographs, temporal methods, and embodied practices to understand how she forges connections with ancestors, and ultimately, with the Philippines. Furthermore, I examine Transience as an Elsewhere, a methodological model and aesthetic that foregrounds identity-making and reconnection in diaspora.