Artist Statement/ Biography

Maia's current body of work consists of small, black and white ink drawings on paper. Because she is using ink and not editing, she cannot erase. The drawings uncover images stored in her visual inventory, revealing a perspective particular to memory and imagination, which is often times skewed, imperfect, and simply made up.

Based on remembered experiences and photographs from the 1970s and 80s, her installations, sculptures, and paintings focus on family life as safe and unsafe, isolating fear and uncertainty. Through the use of colors like the beiges, browns and oranges of the 70s, and dark, stormy, Midwestern landscapes, these images portray her family in domestic settings through the lens of memory and loss.

In addition to her fascination with memory, Maia's work is also about longing and belonging to a family structure and fitting in with a hyphenated cultural identity. As a first generation Filipino-American, she is interested in how outward appearances such as house décor, cars, bric a brac, and brand name ownership can represent assimilation into American culture while Filipino cultural signifiers such as language, food, and moral values remain unseen.

Maia Cruz Palileo's recent drawings, sculptures, and installations focus on family life and domestic settings through the lens of memory and loss. Through the process of recollection and reconstruction, her work recalls the way memory is inevitably imperfect, skews perspective, distorts color, or is simply made up. The passage of time allows imagination, hindsight, and bias to fill in blanks, creating details that border on fiction. Her work has been featured in Contemporary Art Philippines. She has received the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant and Astraea Visual Arts Fund Award. She is currently participating in the Bronx Museum's Artist in the Marketplace Program. Born in Chicago, Maia is a first generation Filipino-American. She holds a BA in Studio Art from Mount Holyoke College and a MFA in Sculpture from Brooklyn College and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.