BIO
Melina Vera-Jaramillo is a Montreal-based artist of Colombo-Peruvian descent. Her interdisciplinary practice spans installation, photography, performance, video, and writing, and explores themes of memory, territory, and diasporic identity through material and participatory processes. She is currently developing projects that engage in explorations of alternative development processes and organic materials. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at the MAI, FOFA Gallery, VAV Gallery, POPOP Gallery, and Produit Rien, among others.
CV
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By Anthony Napoli
Melina Vera-Jaramillo is a Montreal-based artist of Colombo-Peruvian descent. Her interdisciplinary practice spans installation, photography, performance, video, and writing, and explores themes of memory, territory, and diasporic identity through material and participatory processes. She is currently developing projects that engage in explorations of alternative development processes and organic materials. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at the MAI, FOFA Gallery, VAV Gallery, POPOP Gallery, and Produit Rien, among others.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am an artist based in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. My practice is rooted in photography and extends to video, installation, and sculpture, often incorporating familial archives and vernacular elements of what is considered South American culture. Through these mediums, I investigate how images, objects, and material traces carry personal and collective histories and how they can be reinterpreted to create alternative narratives of belonging, identity, and place.
Shaped by my childhood in Medellín, Colombia, my work explores and reimagines stories surrounding identity, queer culture, territory, and memory. I am particularly interested in how personal histories intersect with broader social and cultural narratives and how experiences of displacement, migration, and belonging shape our relationships to place and the stories we inherit.
Drawing from archives, family photographs, and everyday objects, I approach memory as fluid and continuous, rebuilding rather than fixed or complete. Through alternative photographic processes and materials, I explore the image as both a representation and a physical object—one that can be transformed, disrupted, and reimagined. Most recently, the processes I have been researching embrace chance, imperfection, and unpredictability, allowing materials and chemical reactions to participate in the making of images. These interventions create space for ambiguity and abstraction, challenge photography's presumed role as a stable record of reality and open up possibilities for alternative ways of seeing and remembering.
I am an artist based in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. My practice is rooted in photography and extends to video, installation, and sculpture, often incorporating familial archives and vernacular elements of what is considered South American culture. Through these mediums, I investigate how images, objects, and material traces carry personal and collective histories and how they can be reinterpreted to create alternative narratives of belonging, identity, and place.
Shaped by my childhood in Medellín, Colombia, my work explores and reimagines stories surrounding identity, queer culture, territory, and memory. I am particularly interested in how personal histories intersect with broader social and cultural narratives and how experiences of displacement, migration, and belonging shape our relationships to place and the stories we inherit.
Drawing from archives, family photographs, and everyday objects, I approach memory as fluid and continuous, rebuilding rather than fixed or complete. Through alternative photographic processes and materials, I explore the image as both a representation and a physical object—one that can be transformed, disrupted, and reimagined. Most recently, the processes I have been researching embrace chance, imperfection, and unpredictability, allowing materials and chemical reactions to participate in the making of images. These interventions create space for ambiguity and abstraction, challenge photography's presumed role as a stable record of reality and open up possibilities for alternative ways of seeing and remembering.
By Anthony Napoli