The Shoebox (The Gift)
2019 - 2024
Tin Metal, Gesso, Paint, Graphite, Found Objects
Dimensions variable.
This altar installation is titled The Shoebox, though in my heart I have also called it The Gift. It is a bridge built of memory, reaching back to my days as an altar boy in a quiet, old town in the Philippines.
I remember serving at countless funerals, but one May Sunday afternoon remains etched in my mind. Through the ancient wooden church doors, accompanied by the somber tolling of the church bells, came a small procession, mostly children, their soles mostly bare against the cool marble stone floor, clutching candles and picked garden flowers. Leading them was a teenager in a basketball jersey, carrying a shoebox covered in gift-wrapping paper.
When he reached the altar where I stood, he set the box down and gently lifted the lid. There, cradled in cardboard, lay a baby dressed in white.
In this work, I have gathered a small painting of that child and surrounded it with items from that time: books, toys, candies, the gifts they never got to hold, and objects drawn from our shared heritage and roots in the Philippines.
I rendered the small painting of the child in the style of Recuerdos de Patay, the Filipino tradition of post-mortem portraiture practiced from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. For generations, these portraits served as keepsakes of the departed, ways to hold on to memory when time or poverty threatened to take everything else away.
For me, The Shoebox is both a remembrance and a reckoning. It reflects not only the fragility of life but also the stark inequalities that remain in our world, where some families must lay their children to rest without even the dignity of a coffin.
In a way, I wanted to rectify that memory. Where social inequalities are real and apparent and strip away a life’s potential, I offer that child in the shoebox these gifts, imagining an impossible future that is loud with laughter, filled with joy, and rich with chances.
