Annelise Duque is a Filipino-American artist, currently an MFA graduate student at The Ohio State University, and one of thirteen artists featured in Desire Lines, the MFA spring showcase for 2025, open (and free) to all from February 11 to March 15, 2025.

Duque’s work primarily incorporates multi-generational storytelling via memory, identity, and time. From Another world and also this one to Rhyming Bodies and the Philippine Sea, Duque leaves audiences with these questions about family binding: “To survive, what must be preserved? What must be allowed to decay?"

What role do you envision the next/future generation playing in your work? How do you hope they engage with your highlighted themes of ancestry, survival, and family? 

I think about the role of time in my work; I see photography as a way of time-travel, and my work as a way to collapse linear time. I don't like to think of the past as gone. I'm interested in how I see familiar and new relationships play out within the structure of my family; how my niece feels like a mirror of my sisters, how I become more like my mother every day. In that way, the future becomes enmeshed with the past. I think there is great value in looking back to look forward. I like to imagine that intergenerational healing can take place in our present but resonate into the past, and surely will reflect towards the next generations. 

You mention your "scattered self" in relation to your art. How does this sense of personal fragmentation influence the aesthetic and conceptual choices you make in your work?  

Throughout the exhibition, every image is in some way disarticulated. I fragment and take things apart, and then pull them back together. This references my relationship I have with my personal identity coming from a multiracial and multiethnic family, but also the fragile and tenuous nature in the act of remembrance. 

How has your MFA capstone work, and more broadly your academic journey at Ohio State, altered how you see yourself as an artist?

I came to grad school with the desire to see change in my practice. I was looking for new possibilities in my work, which I found through dedicated experimentation with different mediums, approaches, and aesthetics. But there has always been the throughline of generational connection that continues still. It has been incredibly rewarding to see growth and expansion in my work over the past three years.

How does your incorporation of human hair in works like Another world and also this one and Rhyming Bodies and the Philippine Sea relate to themes of intergenerational connection and domesticity?

I began to incorporate my hair as my thread and my way of binding images together in my collages recently. I took inspiration from ritual objects as well as Victorian hairwork. Incorporating human hair felt like my way of imbedding work with my own life energy; it is a way I attend to my work in tandem with the time and attention. It is also a shared trait between me and my siblings, and I like thinking it could have been any of us contributing to the piece. I am currently trying to convince them to let me "borrow" their hair brushes. 

Desire Lines is on view at Urban Arts Space through March 15, 2025.