Melissa Chimera creates mixed media paintings and installations that are research-based investigations into species extinction, globalization and human migration. Her portraits are fictional, but they’re based in empirical fact. She combs through the public record of peoples’ lives, collecting information to better understand them beyond what DNA can tell us. She includes elements and details of what she finds into her paintings. She says that the Philippines are a confluence of so many tragedies. Politically, economically and environmentally. There’s really no work for the people who aren’t middle class. So they move, they immigrate for opportunity and to send money back to their family. This is the story that Melissa is telling, the one she’s trying to better understand. As a descendant of Filipino and Lebanese immigrants herself, it’s a personal one.

She’s currently in-residence at the Anchorage Museum, exploring the Filipino diaspora through research and interviews. To help make sense of all this information, she’s putting two podcasts together. “Drift: Immigration and Identity in America” is an interview series, and “Land and People” looks at practitioners and people with ancestral ties to the land. There’s also a component of cataloging what the land looks like right now for future reference. She says that as she’s interviewing people they’re also unpacking the psychology of internalized racism and what that looks like and what it feels like. It’s complicated because there are so many facets to this project — there’s immigration, there’s the socioeconomic issues, the cost of living and it’s all under the umbrella of capitalism.

Photo courtesy of Josh Branstetter