2025's Jeffrey Ahn, Jr. Fellowship winner was Miguel Caba, a recent BFA graduate of Tufts, whose work engages with how human experiences and relationships are transformed by technology.

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Over the course of their Fellowship summer, Miguel worked on a series of sculptural paintings inspired by their digital correspondence, while based in Boston, with their mother in Toronto, Canada and their grandmother in Kalinga, Philippines. Many of the messages exchanged were pictures from their mother's and grandmother's gardens, received via iMessage or Facebook Messenger, which Miguel rendered via laser-printed paintings on wood. 

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In working through their project, Miguel kept in mind the balikbayan or "returning home" box,  the custom by which overseas Filipinos send boxes filled with functional items or souvenirs back home to their families in the Philippines. Mothers / Gardens can be understood as a new kind of balikbayan practice, intermediated through the artist's specific digital and manual artistic interventions.

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In their artist statement accompanying the work, Miguel wrote:

 

Over the past year I have been recreating images that my mother and grandmother sent to me on iMessage and Facebook Messenger from their homes in Canada and the Philippines respectively. These images get mechanically reproduced, preserving their digital artifacts like my grandmother’s shaky hands and low camera quality, the images sharpening of my mother’s iPhone and file compression required for these images to travel such far distances. The paintings mimic reality in imagery, and in shape they ripple like tilled soil, protrude like window bars, and are round like pots; they are almost but not quite the real thing. 

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Miguel's final project was exhibited in the Project Space of Xspace Cultural Centre in Toronto (November 15, 2025-January 10, 2026), with an essay by Hannah Guiang.

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