The Distance We Carry - Exhibition Text

Kelsey Boncato’s Spirit Pool (Banyan Tree) channels attunement with a flowing river, guarded by two dragonflies, bamboo grove, purple orchids, a fluorite dalmatian jasper necklace and a sacred Philippine fig tree—its intertwining roots spilling into a calm turquoise pool. The figure (self portrait) back floats freely in comfort as the water’s softness and depth is held by earth; an ecological portal. While Queen of Cups (Shell Mirror), reflects the artist’s left eye inside a shell locket grasped by her left hand; an intuitive compass navigating the unseen. Named after the divination archetype of nurturing leadership, the steady hand and single stare represents traversing empathy while holding boundaries.

The two paintings frame in on psychic containers, and are drawn from Boncato’s ongoing Visions and Dreams sketchbooks, her daily sequences of vivid dreams, where scans of each spread were composited into a looped video projection showing the lunar phases in animation.

The “smart” projector mounted on a microphone stand amplifies image as voice, as it flashes onto the wall the gestural storyboards of approximately 500+ dreams from 2022 to Jan 2026 (volumes 1- 8). Boncato’s assemblage presents the weight of subconscious sequences as ephemeral memory, augmented consciousness, and interwoven messages.

The books are drawings of narratives, witnessing relational scenes, and expressions that range from fear, grief, rage and love, across image, song, dialogue, writing and gesture–they are documented dreams which resound the self, the shared other, the environment and beyond. While its moon cycles and loop points to time as an artifice, Boncato’s subconscious travel reflects time as interdimensional. Her animated books slip into a familiar rhythm of both mapping the undercurrents of channeling and a structural map which seeks coherence.

Together, these works carry ancestral imprints of sight, sensitivity, and interconnection through rendering images from the subterranean as divine realities into instilled form. In the context of Tambayan’s Filipino American group show, “The Distance We Carry” Boncato’s work embodies the traces of transient patterns, focusing on the diasporic body as a porous conduit, where she gives space to see, to remember, and to translate for liberation.

Frames by Daniel Oldham @damn__danyo

Special Thanks to D, Chris Oldham, Teena, Margaret and Tambayan Collective.

WORK TITLES

Spirit Pool (Banyan Tree), 2025
Oil on canvas, mahogany frame
48 x 36 in.

Queen of Cups (Shell Mirror), 2025
Oil on canvas, mahogany frame
18 x 24 in.

Visions and Dreams Vol. 1-8 (Moon Phase Flipbook), 2026
Animated video, smart projector, mic stand
01:54, loop

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Kelsey Boncato (b. 1993) is a Filipina American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her multimedia work has exhibited at The Negros Museum, Bacolod Philippines (2023), Human Resources Gallery, LA (2022), Site Gallery, Sheffield UK (2019), Université du Québec à Montréal (2019), TANK Gallery, Neulengbach Austria (2017), Think Tank Gallery, LA (2016), Helen Lindhurst Fine Art Gallery, LA (2016), and Fisher Museum of Art (2015). She earned her BA in Art in intermedia and printmaking from the Roski School of Art & Design and was a recipient of the Discovery Scholar Prize.

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