My research-based art practice interrogates the global entanglements that inform constructions of Philippine identity and cultural value within the Western imagination and within Philippine communities at home and abroad. Using the language of material histories intrinsically linked to colonial economies, national identity, and personal memories of home, Value Studies is a series of sculptural objects, installations, and photography that attempt to articulate the embodied experience of generations of erasure through commodification and its effects on perceptions of cultural value.

The exploitation of Philippine labor is inextricable from the history of colonial economies and globalized racial capitalism, yet this history is largely hidden or suppressed. In Value Studies, this embodied invisibility is a running visual metaphor. Ghostly impressions of a figure and the use of hair and human teeth allude to bodies that are ever-present yet barely visible.