Maia Cruz Palileo: Branch Dance
moniquemeloche is pleased to present Maia Cruz Palileo: Branch Dance, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Palileo’s practice encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, and drawing to question how belonging, assimilation, memory, and displacement intertwine. In their research-based practice, Palileo interrogates ethnographic images from Philippine archives alongside their family’s oral histories and photographs, producing lush landscapes where rivers morph, figures emerge from the trees, and boundaries blur, break, and mirror—obscuring the line between fact and fiction. Branch Dance presents a series of new paintings, works on paper, and ceramic sculptures that reconfigure imagery from colonial postcards, stereoscopic images, and studio portrait photography taken during the US occupation of the Philippines to examine how stories change over time, how memory is imperfect, and how imagination can fill the gaps in historical documentation to counteract Imperialism’s parasitical gaze.
The title of the show, Branch Dance, evokes the movement of wind through trees, a forceful and knowing sway that hints at invisible presences. After the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), photography and printed imagery became inextricably linked to colonial conquest. American soldiers tucked photographs into letters sent home, and images were reproduced on postcards and stereographs for commercial distribution in America. Colonial photography was not neutral, it functioned as a tool of empire, carrying messages about civilization, progress, and otherness, often framing the land, people, and culture through an exoticized lens. During wartime, it sought to undermine the Filipino soldiers who used guerrilla tactics to blend into their surroundings, collaborating with the land to become visually elusive. Through photography, American forces produced fixed, legible images in an attempt to capture an enemy they couldn’t see as evidence of control. These images rendered the Philippine landscape—dense, unpredictable, and full of hidden resistance—into a flattened visual field, stripping it of vitality and danger.
This act of flattening is both visible and visceral when viewing postcards and archival photographs. Palileo’s ongoing engagement with archival materials utilizes collage as a tactile means of intervention. Collage allows experimentation with narrative and spatial possibilities, laying the groundwork for their expansive paintings—where flora, fauna, and landforms are imbued with agency. Formal strategies such as doubling and mirroring extract the stereoscope’s illusion of three-dimensional depth, disrupting linearity and visualizing the space between historical determination and present-day viewership. For the artist, the process of painting blurs boundaries, introducing breath, ambiguity, and slipperiness, providing a framework to re-arrange, re-frame, and re-invigorate Filipino history, and shifting the dynamics of power embedded within the archival image.
