The World Tangled in You", by Maia Cruz Palileo at David Kordansky Gallery

Photo: Disclosure
An X formed by dozens of armed soldiers in marching formation — which, in Maia Cruz Palileo's composition, transforms into the symbol of infinity — is the starting point for one of the central canvases in this artist's first exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery in New York. Titled after a poem by Shirley Ancheta, "The World Tangled in You" features large and small canvases that deepen Palileo's two decades of research into his family's roots in the Philippines, crossing photographic archives of the Philippine-American War with intuitive processes of collage, repetition, and fragmentation of images. By deconstructing and superimposing excerpts from archival photographs, the artist breaks the linear narrative of historical scenes — an effect he compares to a skipping record — creating space to consider the points where history "skips" both as a mark of colonial violence and as a possibility for personal and collective transformation. Even the chromatic choices carry historical research: khaki, the predominant color in 1946, the year of Philippine independence, or shades of American uniforms used during the conflict reappear as indices of a memory that painting rewrites. In the smaller canvases, without the filter of collage, Palileo works more directly and physically, letting the weight and viscosity of the paint guide the narrative.