August 23-October 22, 2023
Gibbs Street Gallery

As an artist and archivist, 2023 VisArts Studio Fellow Joana Stillwell is always thinking about memory, perception, what stories get to be told, who gets to tell those stories, and what ultimately gets preserved. Coming from a working-class Filipino immigrant family, not many things were saved from previous generations due to natural disasters and relocations.

For Stillwell’s site-specific installation in the Gibbs Street Gallery, all the window’s in my mother’s house, she attempts to preserve the teal quality of light in her parents’ home. Stillwell additionally resonates on the few surviving mementos from her mother’s side of the family, along with adopted images, found objects, oral histories, home videos, and ephemeral fragments, to build a body of work that explores the tangibility and fragility of a family archive.