Edmund Arevalo

ARTIST STATEMENT

My interdisciplinary practice investigates the layered complexities of the Filipino diaspora through painting, installation, collage, sculpture, video. At the center of my work is an exploration of the ideas of this in-between space, being neither fully here nor there, belonging to multiple places while existing completely within none. I am interested in the psychological and cultural space produced by migration, where identity becomes fragmented, reconstructed, and continually negotiated between homeland and adopted home, memory and lived experience, presence and absence.

Through processes of collage and décollage, I reconstruct fragmented histories and personal narratives that exist between visibility and erasure. I use fragmentation not simply as an aesthetic strategy, but as a reflection of diasporic experience, pieces of culture, memory, language, family, and history carried across geographic and generational distances. By layering, obscuring, removing, and reassembling these fragments, I create works that operate simultaneously as archives and living structures, objects that hold what has been preserved, what has been lost, and what continues to transform.

Drawing from Filipino American culture, labor histories, spiritual symbolism, street aesthetics, archival imagery, and everyday objects, I treat materials and textures as vessels for memory. These materials carry histories of migration, labor, displacement, assimilation, and survival. I work with archival traces, familial narratives, popular and visual culture, and inherited memories to challenge dominant historical narratives and construct alternative forms of representation. .

Color, material layering, dimensional form, and spatial installation further allow me to construct environments that embody this state of in-betweenness. My work occupies a space between painting and sculpture, archive and memory, object and image, personal experience and collective history. Rather than resolving these contradictions, I embrace them. The work exists in a state of suspension between homeland and diaspora, past and present, belonging and alienation, visibility and erasure.

Edmund Arevalo is a Filipino American artist based in Los Angeles. His work explores the layered histories of identity, and migration. Arevalo weaves his interdisciplinary practice with colonial legacies, personal family stories, and the broader experiences of the Filipino Diaspora. He fuses intimate familial narratives with archival materials, his practice reimagines and challenges dominant narratives of migration, assimilation, and historical erasure. Grounded in both personal memory and collective history, Arevalo’s work becomes a visual act of reclamation honoring his heritage while navigating the complexities of being Filipino American. He is the recipient of the Quinn Emmanuel Artist Fellowship (2023), and a Not Real Art Grant (2019). His work has recently been included in Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass Office (2024), Love Letter to LA Hypeart (2023) at Sized LTD, The New Contemporaries Vol.3 (2023) Residency Art Gallery, A Summer Soirée the Illuminators Gala (2023) at The Vincent Price Museum, South Land Vol.2 (2022) at Charlie James Gallery, Barrio mi Barrio (2022) at South Gate Museum, and Tambayan Vol.2 (2022) at Residency Art Gallery. Arevalo’s work has also been exhibited at public institutions such as the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Vincent Price Art Museum, Torrance Art Museum and Los Angeles City College. Edmund Arevalo received a B.A. in Art from California State University Dominguez Hills (2023).