Handle with Care
Nicolei Buendia Gupit

GALLERY II

Nicolei Buendia Gupit, Handle with Care, 2025, discarded carboard, duct tape, air-dry clay cast of artist's hand, dimensions variable.

January 10 - February 8, 2026

Opening reception: Saturday, January 10 from 6-8pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by A.I.R. National Member Nicolei Buendia Gupit. Through mixed-media and sculptural assemblages, Handle with Care foregrounds how personal memory is woven into broader histories of displacement, inviting viewers to consider the ways in which intimate acts of care persist within the enduring legacies of empire. This is Gupit’s first solo exhibition in New York City.

Informed by Gupit’s engagement with Philippine photographic archives and her own family’s migration, Handle with Care traces the emotional, ecological, and historical entanglements that shape migrant and diasporic experiences. Three interconnected series anchor the exhibition: large drawings on handmade paper that center plants as silent witnesses to histories of extraction and imperialism; mixed-media surfaces embedded with handwoven nets that represent efforts to sustain hope; and cardboard sculptural assemblages that use the motif of the balikbayan box as an emblem of care, sacrifice, and transnational kinship. Together, the works in Handle with Care reflect on the impacts of imperialism on im/migrant labor, displacement, and acts of care.

The series Witnesses to Empire reframes colonial photographs taken during the Philippine-American War and U.S. colonization in the Philippines. By removing human subjects and redrawing only the surrounding plants, Gupit challenges the colonial gaze and imagines plants—traced, redrawn, and rearticulated through handmade plant-fiber paper—as enduring witnesses to American imperialism. Alongside these paper works are Silver Linings, mixed-media works with embedded handwoven fishing nets. The layered surfaces that accumulate across the series evoke the intimate moments of achievement, connection, and hope that ease the weight of migration, even if only briefly.

Complementing these pieces are sculptural assemblages that repurpose and reshape balikbayan boxes, cardboard boxes shipped or carried back to the Philippines from Filipinos living abroad. Durable enough to withstand transit, yet laden with sentiments of care and generosity, Gupit’s interventions underscore the tension between precarity and resilience that defines migrant labor. The tension between the exhibition’s sculptural and functional materials echoes the improvisation, endurance, and acts of love that sustain us. It affirms the power of making as a form of remembering, resisting, and caring across generations.

Nicolei Buendia Gupit is currently working in Burlington, Vermont. She has recently had solo exhibitions in the Philippines, Taiwan, Italy, and the U.S. https://nicoleigupit.com

View Nicolei Buendia Gupit’s artist page here.

View the Press Release here.