Giselle Muzones’s Pagpauli, her first solo exhibition at the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art, is a return to Iloilo rendered through paintings of everyday life, memory, and cultural connection. The works impart a sense of nostalgia and recollection, an emotional terrain familiar to many Ilonggo overseas Filipino workers and members of the diaspora.

The body of acrylic paintings from her ongoing Philippines series brings together images of ordinary life: comfort food, the familiar sari-sari store by the roadside, and faces encountered in moments of reunion and reconnection. These seemingly familiar subjects carry an emotional weight, evoking memories of home and the experience of returning to it.

Muzones first visited Iloilo in January 2024, at the age of 16. She has since returned three more times, using each visit as an opportunity to observe and record the everyday encounters that have shaped her experience of the Philippines—from community gatherings and shared meals to unfamiliar cultural practices and the vivid landscapes of Iloilo.

What began as a record of her travels gradually developed into a more personal body of work. Through painting, Muzones began to bring together her experiences as an artist and as a Filipino American, using her encounters in Iloilo to explore a cultural connection that had been shaped by distance and gradually deepened through experience.

The series has also resonated with audiences beyond the exhibition space. Through social media, Muzones has shared the paintings with Filipinos in both the United States and the Philippines, prompting responses rooted in their own experiences of family, food, place, and belonging. Her images consequently extend beyond her personal encounters, offering familiar points of recognition for others negotiating their own relationships with home and heritage.

A consistent visual element runs through the series, reflecting the vividness of the artist’s experiences and manifesting unfamiliarity, culture shock, and the transience of travel, suggesting that what is remembered is often inseparable from the knowledge that the moment has already passed.

The Philippines series began as Muzones’s senior-year art portfolio and became her first sustained body of paintings. Its development also marked a turning point in her life as an artist. Encouraged by the opportunity to exhibit the work, she chose to pursue painting professionally as a self-taught artist, with travel becoming an important part of both her practice and vocation. 

The title, Pagpauli, or returning home, gives the exhibition a fitting frame. Muzones’s return to Iloilo has become more than a series of visits; it has provided the setting through which she has come to understand place, heritage, and belonging. The paintings preserve those encounters while tracing the gradual formation of a connection that continues to develop each time she returns.