Shaun Mallonga

The function of world-building is a simultaneous act of escapism and subversion. One enters a fictive perspective, and leaves the fantasy with refreshed eyes to perceive the mundane. I make art to get lost in someone else’s story only to carve a space for myself within its niches. I see this same creative muscle flexed within a drag lipsync, a cover song and a blue-and-white tin glazed mutation. The fanfiction both usurps and augments the glamour of the original. I perceive life through the lens of a fat, nonbinary, gay, neurodivergent first-generation Filipinx-Canadian. I make narrative pots and figurative sculpture to record my real and imagined experiences around otherness. My practice is a precious vein of fiction that I utilize fiction to address the entangling themes around my identity: race, religion, class difference, queerness, body dysmorphia and trauma. While appropriation has long been used as a hegemonic tool to snuff out marginalized experiences, I use it as a device to embody my inherited crown of barbs. I draw from gothic grotesques, queer pop culture and Filipino folk art. Fiction is a placeholder for affirmation, speculation and survival.
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