This past winter, Mariah Moneda spent a lot of time taking pictures of her quiet neighborhood — specifically, the bare trees in which birds still decided to build their nests. The idea of leafless trees and creating homes where they are not viable are both foreign to Moneda: born and raised in Arizona, she’s used to lushless, not just in vegetation, but in community, surrounded by other people of color and her family.
That all changed when Moneda moved to Madison to pursue an MFA in Studio Art. In 2022, Moneda left San Diego where she was living and taking care of her elderly grandparents to return to her artistic practice and refine her work.
“My first reaction was like, ‘I can’t do it. I don’t have capacity,’” Moneda recalled. “It was just so guilt-inducing.” Prior to being invited to apply to the MFA program by the artist Tomiko Jones, the young photographer hadn’t even considered graduate school.
Moneda’s decision to uproot her life for grad school — something that she refers to as her own “migration story” — is a split from many things expected of her, both as a Filipino American and a daughter. Her family is made up of three generations of US military personnel, and for a while, this was also her path.
“I was very primed to join the military and everything that came with it,” she said. “I had this ultimate goal of outrank[ing] my dad [in the Air Force]. But then [during] my junior year of high school, I dropped everything to my father’s dismay [because] I was gifted a camera.”
This gift kickstarted years of exploration and experimentation for Moneda. In her remaining time in high school, she turned to broadcast journalism, then attended college at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. But soon after starting the program, she grew uncomfortable with its rigidity.
“For me ,that was really difficult, because it felt too close to the rigidity of this thing that I was running away from, which was the military,” she said. She then pursued a Film & Media degree, and while this brought her closer to her passions, something still wasn’t quite right. She wasn’t collaborating as much with other filmmakers as she wanted.
Instead, in her free time, she spent a lot of time doing solo photo expeditions, throwing herself into commercial photography for the local modeling and fashion scenes. Soon enough, she found herself wanting more.
“[When] I switched to photography, that’s where my life completely pivoted,” she explained. “I felt like, ‘This is where I’m supposed to be, in the fine art world.’”
Moneda’s first subjects were her family, in part because of their proximity to her. She began photographing her grandparents, her brother, and her parents, leaning into capturing the immigrant experience.
These pictures became a way of bridging her experience to that of her relatives of older generations.
“I was raised by all of these immigrants [but] I’m living this very American lifestyle,” she explained. “I actually envision myself as a little hyphen, [an] in between.”
In fact, some of Moneda’s earliest mentors showed her the possibilities of what it means to straddle two worlds and capture that experience in your artistic work. Liz Cohen spent about a decade fabricating a car that she calls the “Trabantimino,” which takes parts from a Chevrolet El Camino and an East German Traubant to build a completely new hybrid vehicle.
“That was always one of the reasons I connected with Liz and her work so much, because it was like everything that I had experienced growing up, but there were no real words to it,” Moneda said.
More importantly, Cohen showed Moneda that she didn’t have to confine herself to photography. “Her practice gave me permission to be interdisciplinary,” she said.
The many ways in which Moneda could practice art became crucial when she began living with her grandparents in San Diego, after the two suffered debilitating injuries from a car accident.
“It was probably one of the hardest couple years of my life,” Moneda recalled.
But it also gave Moneda a clarity of mind around how she approached photography going forward. While caring for her grandparents, Moneda put the camera down and turned to paper arts. When it was time to start taking photos again, her approach was different.
“I think it forced me to really reconcile the why [of my work],” she explained. “Thinking about legacy and sacrifice, of everything that my family has done up until this point so I can go to school and do something that I want to do, and to be extremely grateful for that.”
It’s undeniable that Moneda has pursued what she loves during her MFA program, while staying grounded in her roots. Her exhibit “Messengers for the Living” brings to life the Filipino belief that our ancestors visit their living relatives in the form of butterflies. Over the course of a week, Moneda invited members of the community to fold paper butterflies with her, which amounted to a community sculpture made up of over 600 individual butterflies.
In “Distance to Kababayan,” Moneda interrogates the role of the banana leaf in bringing people together during traditional Filipino kamayan feasts, wherein food is served on banana leaves instead of plates, and people gather around one table to share a meal.
At the heart of both of these artistic explorations is the idea of community — something that Moneda was acutely missing upon moving to Madison.
“I didn’t know anyone out here [in Wisconsin]. I didn’t even know if there was a Filipino population out here,” she recalled. “I think that’s a big reason why community became such an important part of my practice here, specifically. If I can’t find my people, necessarily, there are still people [to commune with].”
The three years Moneda spent creating in her MFA program have now culminated in her thesis art exhibition “Magmula Sa Lupa” (“From the Earth” in Tagalog) which will be on display in the Backspace Gallery Art Lofts (111 N Frances St.) until April 20.
On Friday, April 18, there will be a closing reception that offers attendees a unique, fleeting experience. Taking from her two aforementioned exhibits, “Magmula sa Lupa” is divided into two parts: solitary ritual and warm community. Upon entering the exhibit space, attendees will be asked to write down memories of their favorite food or a meal they shared with loved ones and hang it on a Japanese wishing tree, created out of a mulberry tree from Epic’s Verona campus.
Then, they’ll cross a divider into a second space, in which a kamayan feast will be waiting on long tables. Towards the back of the room, Moneda will cut a lechon, a whole roasted pig that is often the star dish of Filipino gatherings, on a custom-made cherry walnut tree table, fresh and ready to serve.
“What I want for the audience to take away is this feeling of remembering,” she explained. “Have you ever smelled something or tasted something you haven’t had in forever? And then when you think back on it, you remember exactly when and where you were the last time you had it. That’s what I want.”
In a sense, Moneda’s utilization of banana leaves as the foundation of her community building lies in the very fact that she sees herself as a sort of banana leaf here in Wisconsin. To survive harsh winters this far north, banana leaves require very specific conditions that can only be curated inside greenhouses. “It’s on the land, but it’s not integrated into the land,” she explained.
But like these banana leaves, even in her precarity, Moneda’s visionary, community-centered work proves that survival away from home is not only possible, but a welcomed necessity.
“For me, if I can plant a seed for other people to eventually care and cultivate, then I think my job has been achieved.”
