On view a few blocks away at Monique Meloche Gallery, Cruz’s “The Answer is the Waves of The Sea” is a brilliant and provocative rumination on the nature of heritage, history, and place.2
The tropical flora, fauna, and figures that populate Palileo’s large-scale oils stem from her research into nineteenth-century colonial Filipino life conducted during the summer of 2017 at Chicago’s prestigious Newberry Library. Palileo’s visual narratives are neither documentary images nor overt political messaging, despite their origins in a colonial photo archive. If anything, Palileo’s interest in the Filipino politician Isabelo de los Reyes’s 1889 book El Folk-lore Filipino informs the otherworldly qualities of her lavish surfaces.
