ASHLEY DEQUILLA Calumet Park (2024)

ASHLEY DEQUILLA
Calumet Park (2024)
Photo transfer, acrylic gel, oil paint on canvas
18” x 24”
$500

ARTIST STATEMENT:
This new series of work are photo transfers of film stills from the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago collection that have been mediated and encoded through painting. These stills are from home movies made by Nicholas G. Viernes (1902-1991), the unofficial documentarian of the Filipino American community in Greater Chicago, selected for the National Film Preservation Foundation in 2024. As an artist-turned-archivist, I am interested in material culture, memory, and decay. At this time I am not interested in creating traditional art work for personal story-telling, but instead preserving the legacies of our cultural forebearers. I am concerned with the gaps and voids within dominant narratives, I believe that within this space lies the potential for re-defining the past towards healed and just futures.

ARTIST BIO:
Ashley Dequilla (b. 1987) is an artist-filmmaker and archivist of Negrense, Tagalog and Ilonggo descent. In 2023, she obtained her Masters of Fine Arts in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is currently enrolled as an MA student in Art History. Ashley holds a BFA in Studio Art and Art History from the College of William and Mary, and a Post-Baccalaureate in Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art. As a community organizer, Ashley works in the realm of gender violence survivor advocacy and Philippine cultural production. She is a Co-Curator Partner of the Philippine Heritage Collection at the Field Museum of Natural History and a member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). Ashley is the collection manager for the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago and works as a processing archivist to preserve its analog film collection at University of Chicago’s South Side Home Movie Project.