Maia Cruz Paileo

Room#: 306

Website: maiapalileo.com

Bio:
Maia Cruz Palileo's recent drawings, sculptures, and installations focus on family life and domestic settings through the lens of memory and loss. Through the process of recollection and reconstruction, her work recalls the way memory is inevitably imperfect, skews perspective, distorts color, or is simply made up. The passage of time allows imagination, hindsight, and bias to fill in blanks, creating details that border on fiction. Her work has been featured in Contemporary Art Philippines. She has received the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant and Astraea Visual Arts Fund Award. She is currently participating in the Bronx Museum's Artist in the Marketplace Program. Born in Chicago, Palileo is a first generation Filipino-American. She holds a BA in Studio Art from Mount Holyoke College and a MFA in Sculpture from Brooklyn College and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Statement:
Based on remembered experiences and photographs from the 1970s and 80s, my sculptures, drawings, paintings, and installations focus on family life and domestic settings through the lens of memory and loss. Ideas of longing and belonging to a family structure are central to my work. More specifically, I want to investigate the position of a hyphenated cultural identity within a domestic environment. As a first generation Filipino-American, I am interested in how outward appearances such as house décor, cars, bric a brac, and brand name ownership can represent assimilation into American culture while Filipino cultural signifiers such as language, food, and moral values remain unseen.