bio
I am a visual artist and poet who was born in Manila, Philippines and immigrated to the US as a child. I grew up in the Central Valley and Bay Area of Northern California, and currently reside in the Phoenix, Arizona metro area. I use she/they pronouns.
For the sake of making myself legible on the Internet, I identify as: queer Filipinx American, immigrant, ADHD, mentally ill, dharma practitioner, parent. I am more than the sum of these simplified terms. Within the confluence of political, artistic, and spiritual movements towards liberation for black and brown, LGBTQIA, disabled, working class people, I see myself as an artist and teacher.
My work is about relationships: humans exist alongside each other, as well as within the greater context of nature and place, and contemporaneously with the spiritual world(s). The work imagines future worlds of wholeness and solidarity with each other, nature, and all beings—including those who exist in intangible, unseen dimensions.
I stand in solidarity alongside the people of Palestine and all people who seek liberation from genocide and fascism. I urge you to do what you can to stop the genocide in Palestine, as even the smallest acts taken do add up. Please visit PalestineInContext.org to learn more about the history which led to the atrocity happening in the present.
my art is about finding the spaciousness within our everyday lives to bring us closer to each other, to nature, and to the realm of the spirits.
I paint scenes that resist straightforward narratives. I am interested in: characters with secrets; unconventionally beautiful bodies; ambiguous humor; riots of color; having something interesting to look at in every direction. The way I see my work evolves every day. Today, it is a series of experiments in developing an aesthetics, a visual language, and an ethos rooted in a queer diasporic Filipine imaginary. My characters—whose features are improvised as painting progresses—are who they are without needing to explain themselves. Each person has a full life they’ve brought to the present moment: the image. They inhabit dreamlike environments and interiors that defy the programmed logics and aesthetics of mainstream art education.
my work is also a pedagogical space
As a working artist, I do not support my family with earnings from my art. (Yet.) My lived experience and media/art consumption provide the raw material of the work. I have been documenting the process of creating on social media for many years. I use social media to reveal the particular psychic and embodied experience of making art as a mentally ill, queer, mixed-class, colonized subject whose survival depends on laboring within a white supremacist, hypercapitalist system. All of this to say, my hope is for the audience to look at the work and progress shots and know they can make their own art in their own way.
on being an amateur
Without formal training as an artist, I embrace the term amateur in its original form: one who loves their work. I do not chase mastery. Each piece reflects certain emotions, ideas, and capabilities as they are in a certain moment. This way of working entails a radical acceptance of flaws and accidents—and the underlying idea that neither failure nor success in the eyes of capitalism defines my art.
contact
For inquiries, please email yaelvillafranca dot art at gmail dot com