Itlog (Egg)
2019
Zinc, Gesso, Paint, Graphite
8" x 10"
Itlog (Egg) is my queering of the Spanish colonial ex-voto, those small 19th-century paintings, usually on tin metal, where miracles are recorded and gratitude is offered to a patron saint. In my version, my husband and I kneel before the Brown Virgin of Antipolo—beloved protector of Filipino migrants—offering an egg and a candle in thanks for my long-awaited green card. The gesture is both intimate and absurd, tender and subversive. In Tagalog, itlog means “egg,” but it also carries the slang of the body—testicles, humor, flesh. Between devotion and desire, miracle and migration, I find my story refracted in this queered altar of thanks.