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.
Memoir · In Progress
Drag Race,
Please.
A Rejection Story by Virginia Please
A dream of entering Drag Race Philippines opens into a larger story of identity, migration, art, and becoming.
From a mother’s political courage to the expectations of masculinity, from Mabuhay Bitches to filmmaking and community stages, this memoir explores rejection, reinvention, and the worlds we make through drag.
The book is currently being written. Visit the book website for updates and a free reservation list.
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.
