Melissa Chimera

In New Country, specificities related to citizenship are blurred by personal and cultural associations. Here, the artist overlays the word “native” along with other text as printed on her ancestor’s passport and a carefully rendered fig, coupled with pictures of a female child dressed as a girl in a family picture, and passing as a boy in a government photo to ensure safe passage entering a foreign country. Starvation plagued the Mount Lebanon region during World War I, and the young women pictured here survived on wild figs after becoming separated from her family, traveling between Syria and Lebanon, and eventually migrating to the U.S. via Ellis Island.