Jethro Patalinghug
Transformative worlds through queerness.
Art direction, cultural productions, experiential storytelling, and film.
Enter the work
Artist Statement
I build visual worlds where identity, memory, protest, and performance become felt experience.
My work moves between documentary, sculpture, portraiture, installation, and live production. Each form becomes a container for cultural complexity, emotional precision, and spectacle with purpose.
The practice holds contradiction: glamour and grief, protest and tenderness, the personal and the political.
Artifact 01 · Sculptural Series
Disco Balling Heads, 2022
Site: Queer Arts Center, Oakland.
Sculptural heads. Drag materials, jewelry, beads, mirrors, and found surfaces become vessels of glamour and defiance.
Material memory: honorific, reflection, survival, and performance residue.
Artifact 02 · Sculptural Object
Drag Everything Up
Sculptural object. Drag Everything Up reclaims power from objects that represent the institutions where I experienced bullying.
Gesture: transmutation — the object is transformed through drag materiality, jewelry, rhinestones, charms, and hair into a charged devotional form.
Artifact 03 · Sculpture
The Performer
Sculptural body fragment. The Performer considers the duality of queer and trans bodies being physically dismembered and dismembered from institutions and society.
Material memory: drag, glamour, and joy become strategies of survival, holding the body as archive, ornament, and refusal.
Artifact 04 · Life-sized Sculpture
Gabriela Rising, 2023
Site: Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore.
Sculpture. A life-sized figure shaped by militant women, Gabriela, and the Babaylan — precolonial spiritual and cultural leaders.
Offering: ancestry, militancy, care, and transformation held in one body.
Artifact 05 · Installation · Performance
Manghihilot, 2024
Artifact 06 · Portraiture · Exhibition
KAANYAG, 2025
Site: The Chan National Queer Arts Center, San Francisco.
Portrait series, 2025. Drag performers appear as protectors, icons, and living cultural memory.
Intention: Glamour is visibility, courage, and refusal.
Artifact 07 · Live Production · Event Direction
Harmonic Convergence, 2022
Site: Herbst Theater, San Francisco.
Pageantry becomes lineage, spectacle, and collective visibility.
Offering: concept development, creative direction, production coordination, vendor stewardship, VIP reception, volunteer teams, and community engagement.
Artifact 08 · Documentary · Editorial Storytelling
Documentary Work
Film practice. Documentary is the foundation: listening, structure, and emotional truth inside complex social histories.
Reconciliation: the archive becomes a place to revisit harm, memory, intimacy, and repair.
Portfolio Ecosystem
Three doors into one practice.
This site holds the conceptual and visual-art practice. For technology and brand storytelling, visit jethrocreative.com. For documentary film work, visit jethrofilm.com.
Recognition
Selected Awards & Fellowships
Collaborators
Contact
Let’s build the world around the story.
Transformative worlds through queerness.
