diaspora, displacement
POEM / FIBERS
2019
nebulous
SOCIAL PRACTICE / ARTIST BOOK / PRINT MEDIA
2021 / 2022
original artist book is a hardcover digitally printed perfect bound book, with an accompanying smaller, soft cover edition of 4. exhibition view includes hanging cyanotypes on silk organza.
2022 edition of 7 printed at Queer Archive Work in Providence, RI on RISO SF9450. teal ink on French Paper in extra butcher blue and Neenah UV/Ultra vellum in bright white.
over the course of the last year, I’ve been reflecting on my experiences as an immigrant and daughter of immigrants, as a brown person, as a queer person, as a young person drifting through uncertainty, as someone alive and subject to the anxieties, limitations, and violences of the capitalist, white supremacist, cis/hetero/patriarchy. the term assimilation comes up repeatedly. for a while my reflections were focused on assimilation as a process of self-erasure, on all the ways I have changed or been forced to change in order to feel safe or like I belong in my surroundings. but now I’m also considering how belonging rests on an ability to transform. I’m considering how being fluid and fractured can lead to a more expansive way of existing. I want to lean into ideas of identity as multiplicitous rather than singular: of being difficult to name: the self as a nebulous construction.
for this project, I invited people in my life to reflect on their own relationships to assimilation and identity construction through a series of guided writing and making exercises. this book is a collaborative publication that gathers their reflections along with mine and presents them mixed up, entangled with each other.
nebulous is a collaborative publication created as part of my senior thesis. it was exhibited in the Smith Gallery at Appalachian State University from December 3 to December 13.
hi. my name is MJ Sanqui. I‘m from Boone, North Carolina. I’m twenty - four years old. my birthday is in November. I’m a scorpio. my hair is black, my eyes are dark brown. I’m five feet tall. my parents and I immigrated from the Philippines when I was very young. I have one sister named Len. I’m a senior in college. it’s nice to meet you.
hi. my name is MJ Sanqui. I‘m from Boone, North Carolina. I’m twenty - four years old. my birthday is in November. I’m a scorpio. my hair is black, my eyes are dark brown. I’m five feet tall. my parents and I immigrated from the Philippines when I was very young. I have one sister named Len. I’m a senior in college. it’s nice to meet you.
hi. my name is MJ Sanqui. I‘m from Boone, North Carolina. I’m twenty - four years old. my birthday is in November. I’m a scorpio. my hair is black, my eyes are dark brown. I’m five feet tall. my parents and I immigrated from the Philippines when I was very young. I have one sister named Len. I’m a senior in college. it’s nice to meet you.
hi. my name is MJ Sanqui. I‘m from Boone, North Carolina. I’m twenty - four years old. my birthday is in November. I’m a scorpio. my hair is black, my eyes are dark brown. I’m five feet tall. my parents and I immigrated from the Philippines when I was very young. I have one sister named Len. I’m a senior in college. it’s nice to meet you.
hi. my name is MJ Sanqui. I‘m from Boone, North Carolina. I’m twenty - four years old. my birthday is in November. I’m a scorpio. my hair is black, my eyes are dark brown. I’m five feet tall. my parents and I immigrated from the Philippines when I was very young. I have one sister named Len. I’m a senior in college. it’s nice to meet you.
hi. my name is MJ Sanqui. I‘m from Boone, North Carolina. I’m twenty - four years old. my birthday is in November. I’m a scorpio. my hair is black, my eyes are dark brown. I’m five feet tall. my parents and I immigrated from the Philippines when I was very young. I have one sister named Len. I’m a senior in college. it’s nice to meet you.
hi. my name is MJ Sanqui. I‘m from Boone, North Carolina. I’m twenty - four years old. my birthday is in November. I’m a scorpio. my hair is black, my eyes are dark brown. I’m five feet tall. my parents and I immigrated from the Philippines when I was very young. I have one sister named Len. I’m a senior in college. it’s nice to meet you.
hi. my name is MJ Sanqui. I‘m from Boone, North Carolina. I’m twenty - four years old. my birthday is in November. I’m a scorpio. my hair is black, my eyes are dark brown. I’m five feet tall. my parents and I immigrated from the Philippines when I was very young. I have one sister named Len. I’m a senior in college. it’s nice to meet you.
hi. my name is MJ Sanqui. I‘m from Boone, North Carolina. I’m twenty - four years old. my birthday is in November. I’m a scorpio. my hair is black, my eyes are dark brown. I’m five feet tall. my parents and I immigrated from the Philippines when I was very young. I have one sister named Len. I’m a senior in college. it’s nice to meet you.
hi. my name is MJ Sanqui. I‘m from Boone, North Carolina. I’m twenty - four years old. my birthday is in November. I’m a scorpio. my hair is black, my eyes are dark brown. I’m five feet tall. my parents and I immigrated from the Philippines when I was very young. I have one sister named Len. I’m a senior in college. it’s nice to meet you.
the voice that speaks for me
SOUND / PERFORMANCE / ESSAY
2021
sound installation and performance piece, 7 minutes 15 seconds
this work is concerned with the capacity of recorded and synthetic sound to provoke a sense of iunease and uncanny dread. the soundscape seeks to exploit a network of fears and anxieties related to social media, artificial intelligience, data collection, and advanced vocal and facial surveillance and recognition; the fear of the double, perhaps realized by advanced technologies.
this sound piece is best played through headphones, or aloud in a quiet space where one can be alone. listeners are recommended to hear it in complete darkness. as a performance piece, it should be played after the artist introduces themself outloud.
catharsis!
ABSTRACT IMAGE / MIXED MEDIA / FIBERS
2019 - 2021
handmade paper with inclusions, monoprints, watermarks. prints and drawings on handmade paper made during the 2019 fall concentration at the penland school of crafts
selected works were exhibited in a solo show called catharsis! at the looking glass gallery in boone, nc from november 8 - december 8, 2021.
my thoughts have always been jumbled up, like they're moving too quickly to understand, so I often think out loud. drawing and painting feel like that: putting a mark on the page is the most direct line to making my internal world tangible. in the last few years, working abstractly has become a way of sifting through, a kind of automatism through which I can allow color, texture, and marks to give physical form to what I can't quite reach with words.
in 2019 I had the opportunity to study papermaking and printmaking at the penland school of crafts for a semester, during which I handmade all of the paper for this body of work. this work is messy and exuberant. at times meditative but more often like catharsis - unexpected and unmeasured, arriving as a burst.
queer signification
SOCIAL PRACTICE / ALT PHOTO / DOCUMENTARY / WEARABLE
2021
audio and video documentary, cyanotype on thrifted clothing, digital photo. shot on sony a65-SLT, sony A7 III, and sony 4K handycam camcorder. various sized clothing, video shot in 24p 4K 16:9.
documentary videos upcoming
this project is a collaborative cross-disiciplinary work weaving documentary video, photography, printing on textiles, and interviews together to explore queer experience and how queer people relate to their own bodies and their appearance. I’ve learned a lot about my own gender expression through queer people who are close to me and I’m inspired by them constantly to question how I identify. I was lucky to have three close friends participate in this iteration of the project: Sol, Rasier, and Kayla. throughout the multiple stages of this project and in the conversations I had with the three of them, I’ve explored ideas about the body and our various relationships to it, about dressing as affirmation, and about physical presentation as a mode of communication.
an interview and documentary process exploring queer aesthetics, body politics, and our relationships to our physical presentation.
read the interview questions and transcripts here
experimental garments
ALT PHOTO / WEARABLE
2021
tie-back top and skirt set, cyanotype on cotton, sized for 5’ tall, 25” waist.
experimenting with clothing as adornment/ affirmation/ projection
cyanotype images from my alternative photo and artist book, ritual / routine
dissonance
SOUND / VIDEO
2020
experimental digital video, found audio and open source sample arrangement
vimeo link for mobile viewing
surrounded constantly by screens yet with endless solitude to spend in my own head, I find myself ungrounded. sometimes I have to actively refocus my eyes.looking for solidity, I reach into digital visual spaces to anchor me to something. when anxiety is high - almost always - I play movies, TV, youtube videos in the background to keep me company while I work and it almost feels like a friend in the room. dozens of hours of video blend seamlessly in my brain, swimming around with imagined interactions, course calendars, intrusive thoughts, zoom calls, vague reminders to eat something soon.
in october 2021, I posted an open question on instagram about others’ lingering sensory awareness during dissociation and one person told me: “it’s like watching a movie but not really paying attention”. my cousin said that it makes them feel like they’re “separated from everything by a glass.” for some people, it’s voices seeping in, a hyper awareness of their own weight, or only warm lights registering. this video is an experiment in simulating my own dissociative daydreams and the vaporous sense of being here but only just.
1.5: a meditation on climate grief
SOCIAL PRACTICE / ARTIST BOOK / PRINT MEDIA
2019
accordion form artist book, digital print.
photos by Hayley Canal, manipulated by the artist.
climate grief zine workshop run by Hayley Canal, Dustin Hicks, and MJ Sanqui.
the abstract images pieced together in this book are from a collaborative mural created by a group of students who have been doing climate action work all semester. through automatic drawing we confronted grief, rage, anxiety, and hope brought on by the imminence of climate disaster and the unjust reality of an inequitable, destructive, and exploitative system.
the text in this book is directly sourced from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) October 2018 special report on the measures neccessary to keep global warming at 1.5 degrees celsius.
in the mirror, there is solace
a Me, I recognize
my eyes, the eyes of others
projection,
rejection
every recognition
a misrecognition
reflection mirage delusion
why do I
identify
with this Me
that isn’t Me?
a Me, I recognize
my eyes, the eyes of others
projection,
rejection
every recognition
a misrecognition
reflection mirage delusion
why do I
identify
with this Me
that isn’t Me?
this image, my skin
fantasy
familiar
an object of vision, constructing
beholding, negating
rearranging
it will take some time to see
my Whole
it’s never finished
it’s never finished
it’s never finished
fantasy
familiar
an object of vision, constructing
beholding, negating
rearranging
it will take some time to see
my Whole
it’s never finished
it’s never finished
it’s never finished
made while I was reading and thinking a lot about feelings of dysmorphia. much of this thinking was inspired by the writings of Jacques Lacan on the imago and the mirror stage
*Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage quoted on pages 5 and 6
*John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Episode 3 quoted on page 11
for old friends and exes, thank you
ARTIST BOOK / PRINT MEDIA / EPHEMERA
2019 / 2022
artist book, drum leaf binding, inkjet prints, scans of photos, letters, notes, cards collected over the years. interactive web version. a grateful goodbye
