SEXUAL HEALING
Sexual Healing explores intimacy, shame, and liberation through the queer male body. Drawing from religious iconography, classical sculpture, and natural formations of stone, the series reimagines the body as both subject and vessel, a site of trauma, desire, and transcendence.
Get Me Bodied, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 50 x 50 cm
Original Sin, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm
Erasure, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm
Using Polaroid emulsions lifted onto canvas, I reconstruct fragmented images of male figures and crystalline forms in varying states of vulnerability and ecstasy. Each layer of the photograph is peeled, lifted, and assembled, echoing the slow, imperfect process of emotional and spiritual healing. In this repetition, the act of making becomes both confessional and subversive—a reclaiming of the erotic as sacred.The natural wrinkles, cracks, and air bubbles that emerge become part of the language of repair, flaws that hold truth. Through this process, anonymity becomes a catalyst for liberation, allowing fragments of the self to exist without expectation or shame.
Human Condition, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 cm
Cruising, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 cm
THE PIECES RECLAIM WHAT THE CLASSICAL CANON HID IN PLAIN SIGHT – THE EROTICIZED MALE BODY, ONCE IDEALIZED AND DESEXUALIZED AT THE SAME TIME.
The figures, often sculpted in stone or cast in bronze, embody both strength and stillness, echoes of the torsos that drift through digital seas of desire, line the walls of bathhouses, and endure pain in pursuit of connection. These fragmented bodies speak to the tension between intimacy and anonymity, pleasure and endurance, the sacred and the profane. Their stoicism becomes symbolic of survival, while the fragility of the Polaroid surface reveals what lies beneath the façade of control.The phallus, a recurring motif throughout the series, serves not as a symbol of dominance but of vulnerability, reclamation, and becoming. Through these crystalline and corporeal forms, Sexual Healing reframes pleasure as an act of transformation, where the physical and spiritual converge.
Exposure, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm
Reclamation, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm
Colour plays an intentional role throughout the series. Each hue is chosen through the lens of colour psychology and the energetic language of the chakras: red for desire and disconnection, yellow for attention and insecurity, violet for spiritual awakening. These colours do not merely decorate the image; they vibrate with emotion, guiding the viewer through states of tension, release, and restoration.
Master Healer, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 7 panels, each 20 x 20 cm
As a queer Filipino Canadian artist, I confront inherited shame surrounding sexuality and the body, shame rooted in colonialism, religion, and the Western gaze. The repetitious nature of the work becomes both devotional and defiant, a meditation on forgiveness, reclamation, and self-acceptance.
Between photography and painting, body and spirit, stone and skin, Sexual Healing reflects the quiet power of becoming whole, an ongoing dialogue between vulnerability and resilience, and the beauty that lives in between.
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