2024.

Tightrope to Sanity is the inaugural installment of the Visual Utopia series. A visual return to childhood
memories shared with the artist’s late father, who passed away when she was nineteen. Created at twenty-three, the series vandalizes and reclaims these moments, using the visual language of 2000s cartoon nostalgia and video game graphics to evoke the hyperbolic, uninhibited experience of growing up. This piece refuses the carceral logic that urges us to police our sorrow and lock our hearts away to maintain neat timelines of productivity. Tightrope to Sanity treats grief as a disorienting, liminal space, symbolized by a cartoon airplane circling overhead bearing the lyrics of her father's farewell note: "I’m leaving on a jet plane. Don’t know when I’ll be back again. " The work charts the journey of inheriting one's own love and loss. Ultimately, the series acts as a practice of abolition by honoring heartbreak and grief as a time-traveling force that expands the heart and restores our capacity to love and hold each other through the ruins.

Art Direction and Photography: Rachel “Spicy Gobou” Aquino
Production: Rachel “Spicy Gobou” Aquino, Preston Rolls, Dylan Haefner
Model: Mackenzie Panganiban
Hair and Make-up: Isa Velita and Paprixa
Stylist: Kathcleen
Graphic Artist: Micaela Paloma
3D Art: Alex Cao