Monica canilao biography

She has shown extensively within the United States and internationally in both traditional and non-conventional gallery spaces.
Monica Canilao is an interdisciplinary artist whose work shifts and flexes with the elements of landscape and time.
She received her BFA from California College of the Arts (2005).

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The only constant in my life has been that I've always wanted to be creating, building, drawing, altering. My art practice is a way to generate a personal and living history. My community and collaborators, my roots and their nearly lost traditions, my neighborhood and its trash piles are all integral, necessary parts of my life and art. The way I go through the world, the beauty of people’s effort throughout time, and their subsequent decay end up in my pieces. I look as much to the loving meticulousness of handicrafts as to the techniques of high art. Taking something as ordinary as wood pulp or cloth and passing thread through it can make common things beautiful and useful.

From boats to portraits to wearable alters, everything I make I use to reimagine the meaning of home, the power of collectivity and the imprint history has left on me. By using images that are rooted in commonalities of personal history, I attempt to create a visual vernacular that resonates beyond verbal and individual differences. These works bear an encoded meaning with the intent to trigger some los

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Monica Canilao

MonicaCanilao makes art from various types of objects and uses several different techniques of implementing them into one unique piece. She uses only second-hand stuff because she deeply believes used stuff has more soul and more spirit inside. Spiritually driven, this talented artist collects ordinary and everyday items people often throw away, while they are in still good condition. She has an idea of exploring how a man perceives an instrumental object. Sometimes the meaning of an object is derived from its usage capabilities, and sometimes people get attached to things because they look pretty or have some sentimental value. This aspiring woman subsumes this emotional attachment to the idea of home. Home, as a sacred place we live and exist, a place we are born or reborn.

Canilao explores how a man perceives an instrumental object

Constant Flows of Creation

She paints, makes prints, stitches, weaves, combines various kinds of material into elaborative installations. Canilao grew up between San Francisco and San Jose in Redwood City, California a

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Jewelry||Adjacent: Monica Canilao

Also in this series:

This is the third article in a series focused on artists whose work is adjacent to jewelry. For my purposes, jewelry-adjacent artists use material, techniques, or themes related to jewelry practices. The body is present in their work, not necessarily as the recipient of adornment, but in the importance of the physical body to their form, topic, or narrative. The adjacency of these artists to jewelry provides fresh perspectives to those of us immersed in the field.

Monica Canilao[1] is a mixed-media artist who works with cast-off and abandoned objects. She collects and archives these objects as mementos of the displaced and forgotten people and places our culture leaves behind in its constant march toward the future. Her practice is uncontained and fluid, difficult to define beyond the found objects that are central to her work.

She completed her bachelor’s degree at California College of the Arts, when it was still California College of the Arts and Crafts, in the Bay Area. Though she began her formal studies w