Melanie Garcia

Through the lens of my Filipino heritage, I am currently examining identity, place, and memory as someone born and raised in Québec. My work is exploring the effects of assimilation and dislocation, questioning my relationship to the Philippines—a place I have never been—while seeking connection through familial cultural knowledge, archival images, and symbolic language.

Using digital manipulation, photocopies, collage, and screen printing, I navigate the intersections of personal history, fiction, and the mutable nature of memory. My process reflects on the veil between presence and absence, where fragments of family archives and found imagery become unstable narratives between recollection and erasure.

My work contains an existential inquiry into mythmaking, inherited histories, and the void that lingers in the spaces between. I embrace the unreliable narrator, where nostalgia and loss coalesce into fractured storytelling—an attempt to reconcile the known with the unknown.

Melanie Garcia is a mixed media artist whose works have been exhibited in Canada, US and Europe. She is a taurus and a non-identical twin. When not pushing around little pieces of paper, Melanie offers art workshops to youth in and around Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.

melaniegarcia.ca

Melanie Garcia. Where Do We Go From Here? 2024, image credit: Mel Saumure