folklore
Solo Exhibition at Arlington Arts Center
October, 2013
Folklore is an exploration of my family’s history using information culled from a variety of sources including newspapers, the internet, and recollections from family members. Using these snippets as departure points, I created a coming-of-age tale that blurred the line between truth and fantasy and ran parallel lines between United States' complicated history with the nation of Panama and my relationship with my Panamanian father.
"Autobiography is most explicit in Kristina Bilonick’s “Folklore,” which views her family’s connection to Panama from multiple angles. Sculpture, painting and audio are among the array, along with three sibling recollections of being on a small plane hit by lightning. If personal history is tangled, things get even knottier when the wider world enters: The bit players in Bilonick’s multimedia bildungsroman include Patty Hearst and Manuel Noriega, and the latter is remembered with a mix tape that includes “I Fought the Law.”
-Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post, December 13, 2013
