hinan // evacuation
hello friends ! i'm super excited to announce that i'm going to have a solo exhibition with walter maciel gallery that opens march 2, 2019.
there is an artist reception from 6-8pm that evening and i will be there. if you are in the area i'd love to see you !
above is one of many pieces i've been working on over the last couple years. the show is all about the internment of the Japanese during WWII. here's the press release:
Lisa
Solomon
Hinan //
Evacuation
2 March –
20 April 2019
Opening
Reception: Saturday, March 2nd, 6:00 – 8:00pm
Walter Maciel Gallery is pleased to present the
exhibition, Hinan // Evacuation by
Lisa Solomon marking her fourth solo show with our gallery. The new body of work focuses on Japanese
Americans who were forced into internment camps and the consequences of
Executive Order 9066 signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19,
1942 during World War II. The show questions
the physical and emotional effects left upon the Japanese American community and
will include a film series of short documentaries on survivors in Gallery 4.
Solomon grew up in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara
with no knowledge of the Japanese Internment Camps as a young student in
California public schools. Her mother emigrated
from Japan in 1971 after meeting her Jewish American father and she had some
affiliation with the Japanese American community in Southern California. During this same period of history, the
Holocaust was happening across Europe using similar tactics to capture a
specific group of people based on their race.
Although the outcome for Japanese Americans was certainly different with
most being spared torture and execution, the parallels of human repression,
fear and racial bias became of interest to Solomon in the production of this
work. Upon further research she learned
that there were relocation collection points near her home in Oakland and she
could superimpose in her mind the lines of people waiting to be “evacuated” at
these locales. Furthermore, our current political spectrum has brought a lot of
racist, hateful, and illegal circumstances that have allowed for the attempt to
pass laws much akin to the notions behind Executive Order 9066. In his first two years in office, Trump
implemented the Muslim Ban restricting travel for specific ethnic groups while
separating thousands of families at the US border. It has become clear that our
nation is once again confronting, resisting and reasserting white racist and
colonial ideals.
Some of the work in our show depicts evidence of racism
in the signage from businesses that had to close and the maps posted and used
to collect residents. In one large work
a reproduction of a Western Defense poster reading “Instructions to all persons
of JAPANESE ancestry”, is reproduced as a drawing with the word JAPANESE
embroidered using a Sashiko stitch often used in Boro (the mending of clothing
with small scraps of fabric). Other works
focus on images from the camps that express human joy in celebration of the
holidays and family ceremonies. Solomon
became awestruck by the sense of normalcy keeping up with family traditions of observing
harvest festivals, Boy Scout parades and Christmas perhaps as subconscious acts
of resistance. In a series of paintings,
different women who were declared Queens of their respective camps during a
Harvest Festival are depicted with one crown displaying “Queen of Manzanar”.
The women are dressed in fashion of the time, their hair coiffed in Western
Styles, seemingly happy and carefree in contrast to their jarring
circumstances. Other works such as 25 Tea
Cups exist as a sculptural installation with the number 25 representing the
number of temporary and long-term camps in total. In thinking about how to keep things
“normal,” Solomon realized that tea is such a major part of daily life for
Japanese and she discovered there are 23 basic tea bowl shapes. In this piece she made 25 tiny tea bowls out
of white paper clay using the 23 different shapes leaving them white as if to
act as a ghostly reminder. Each tea bowl has the name, active dates and number
of internees written in gold on its face and is placed on a long wooden shelf.
Overall, the show displays the high form of respect and self-discipline taught
in Japanese culture in adhering to the laws of the camps and adapting to their
restricted lives while honoring traditions mirroring what life would have been
like out of the camps. The show is a
powerful reminder of our government’s mistakes and the embarrassment of being
involved in a World War partly in aide to those being forced into internment
camps by racial identity all the while employing the same circumstances back
him in the US.
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