Jaclyn Reyes
ARTIST, RESEARCHER,
& CULTURAL ORGANIZER
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Infinite Landings (2025)
Exhibited in LAKBAY: Voyages into the Absolute with Nena Saguil, Art House, Manila, Philippines, 2025.
This experience carries with it layers of complexity. It is informed by histories of colonialism, migration, and displacement, as well as the lived reality of navigating identities that are at once Filipino and American but never fully understood as either. These contradictions are not just burdens; they are sites of creativity and speculation, spaces where new ways of seeing and being can emerge. In tracing these arcs—both Saguil’s and my own—I sought to map not only the distances between places but also the resonances, the echoes that reverberate across time, memory, and geography.
The Filipino-American experience is shaped by a duality: misunderstood by Filipinos in the Philippines yet filtered through American racial hierarchies that fail to fully comprehend its nuances. There’s a dissonance here, and within that dissonance is opportunity—a space to speculate, to experiment, and to form new vernaculars for what it means to be of two places and yet belong wholly to neither.
For this project, the infinity sign, made tangible in an 8-inch form, became a conceptual anchor. Sideways, it speaks to endlessness—of migration, of identity, of the tide’s pull. It mirrors the ocean’s cycles, inextricable from the moon’s phases, as well as the experience of living across time zones: the day/night oppositions, the half-day difference, the strange simultaneity of being in two temporalities at once. During a time when I was separated from someone dear to me by the Pacific Ocean, these phases took on an intimate resonance. The moon became a quiet marker of our shared time; the ocean carried the tension of distance, longing, and connection.
The dots that populate Infinite Landings carry the weight of sediment. In oceanography, sediment is the history of the ocean floor, a memory of what once was—rocks, shells, homes—eroded and carried away by currents. Diaspora operates similarly: particles swept by waves of migration, fragments of a homeland displaced and scattered. These dots shift in scale: microscopically, they are the granules of sand and sediment; cosmically, they are constellations and planets.
Thinking abstractly helped me stretch across scales, holding migration’s global patterns, its personal resonances, and its vibrational energies in a single, trembling gesture. The vibrations trace a layered and restless history: an homage to the Philippines as a geological crucible, born from tectonic collisions, the land itself quaking under the strain of its origins. They echo outward as sound waves—remittances pinging through satellites, rippling through enclaves and communities like signals from some vast, invisible network, tethering lives that are otherwise flung far apart.
These vibrations also belong to the moon, to the swell and pull of its fullness, the way it urges the ocean to rise and break. Tides, remittances, tectonics—the energies of diaspora are rarely still. They crest and recede, reverberate and reverie, refusing to settle into neat shapes or borders. They move through landscapes, histories, bodies, communities, and oceans alike. In Infinite Landings, I wanted to surface these vibrations, not to pin them down, but to allow them to pulse—across time, across distances, across all that holds us together and pulls us apart.
Infinite Landings invites viewers to drift through this space of motion and memory, between land and sea, presence and absence, and the luminous threads that bind them all.