Jeanne F. Jalandoni
With All You Possess, 2024
Oil on canvas, screen printed tulle, acrylic, cotton, acrylic yarn
Courtesy of the artist

This work is on loan for the exhibition, Living Here, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, June 20 - December 20, 2025

Jalandoni raises her family history to mythological proportions with beings of her own invention: humans with carabao heads. Strong and hard-working, these water buffalo are the national animal of the Philippines. The artist associates them with her maternal grandfather, who built a farm with two carabaos to help him.

In With All You Possess, she positions them in an ambiguous network of desire and escapism that reverberates between America and the Philippines. Their yokes break as they plough the farm and they burst free in front of the kind of romanticized tropical sunset that appears on Philippine postcards aimed at American tourists. Their clothing is distinctively Filipino—terno shirts with high-shouldered butterfly sleeves—but a dreamlike photograph of Jalandoni, an American-born child in the United States, is reproduced on one of their skirts. She seems to be standing next to the Statue of Liberty, a symbol of hope and freedom, but this is an illusion. The photograph was taken next to a replica Lady Liberty in Washington state. Through references to the past and future of her family, the artist reflects a history of unsettled fantasies between the two nations.