Melissa Chimera

The mixed media sculpture includes the artist as a child among family members traversing from the Philippines and Lebanon to America as told through the public archive of place names from ship manifests, census records, etc. stitched at the bottom. The work also references today’s journeys made by contract South Asian migrant fishermen of Honolulu Harbor, health care and hospitality workers, and political asylum seekers. The piece calls into question the tenuous and fraught relationship between immigrants—both legal and undocumented—and their countries of departure and arrival as they search for work, family or evade imprisonment and death.