KELSEY BONCATO
■ CYCLE 1 fellow — SS 26
Visions from a Diamond Eye is inspired by elemental gifts of the Babaylan (seer/spiritual guide) as described in artist Perla Paredes Daly’s decolonial essay in Back from the Crocodile’s Belly. I bridge and reclaim this receptive power through the dreaming body as a divine ancestral bearer —an interplay of tension and release through sensuality and gentility. My work is a collaboration with the physical and virtual landscape as it erupts my relationship with others through traditional and visionary mediums.
The four paintings are an ecosystem of psychic transformations drawn from my subconscious realm: a levitation to the moonlight that illuminates the eyes and heart, a dragonfly shifts blue-white on my mouth, and an elder head transitions to brass-gold with a blood offering. Through travelling parallel realities, messages murmur with honest possibilities, as my process is birthed from first being a witness then as a channel. My paintings are ethereal windows to a potent underworld that’s alive in oscillation.
The video enchants temporality –a documentative video piece recorded on the New Moon in Gemini of two delicate damselflies commencing to mate on my body, with a spiraling tutubi wheel, sculpted and painted in VR as 2D projection. The riverscape footage deepens my surrender to aligned timing as I fully join the dragonflies to fortify fertility, asserting life as a creative feminine force. Emulating a seductive dance between bodily-physical and spirit form, the time-based piece plays with presence as interdimensional.
Together, my paintings and video projection move from initiation into animating a translucent metamorphosis that croons ancestral communication —purging out quiet and arousing energies swathed from the subliminal.
VISIONS FROM A DIAMOND EYE
an interview with the artist
Flowing from my line of disempowered visionaries —femmes who were betrayed, silenced, and hijacked by destructive colonialism— my practice is informed by my ancestral inheritance of clairvoyance and clairsentience as I transmute dream messages from the subterranean into material form. I study the complexities of memory, emotion, and the relationship of others through my on-going dream documentation, investigating the control on what seeps out and what bleeds in. Building my psychic lexicon, I’ve developed my interdisciplinary practice as a devotional commitment around body, water, and dreamwork as ritual.
Exploring the melodious undulation of oil painting, my process starts from below with a red-pink layer as a warm tone —symbolic of blood, a trace shared with the Philippine T’boli dreamweavers’ palette. I softly blend together, caressing and gliding the oil and its pigment, translating details slowly and rhythmically. I summon clarity to the mystique and transcendental imagery that wails to be seen and felt.
I integrate instrumental technologies through the trace of bodily gesture, editing, and projecting video. This stirs my traditional practice with its expansiveness, orchestrating time and space, as I further augment the sensible realm. Altogether, my new works support my embodied research and practice on subconscious synchronicities that question the containment of energy and the rupture of suppressive control —offering release, intuitiveness, and an openness from within.
KELSEY BONCATO
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KELSEY BONCATO *
Kelsey Boncato (b. 1993) is a Filipina American interdisciplinary artist working across painting, animation, and immersive media. Her practice draws from Philippine animistic cosmologies — particularly the figure of the babaylan, or spiritual guide — and from her ongoing Visions and Dreams sketchbooks, weaving dreams, ancestral memory, and embodied experience into material and time-based forms. Through intimate transmissions, poetic pattern, and symbolism, she explores the fluid boundaries between the subliminal and the felt, tracing the diasporic body across space and time.
Her collaborative art and sound labyrinth, FOREST for––rest, exhibited internationally in 2019, was nominated for Best Digital Experience by Sheffield Doc|Fest and awarded Best VR Experience by VRHAM! in Hamburg. Boncato holds a B.A. in Art from USC Roski School of Art and Design and is a 2026 AAPI Emerging Artist Fellow and recipient of the Discovery Scholar Prize.
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