Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
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STATEMENT OF WORK
Guided by tools for massage and positioning, nonwestern medicine, and Japanese language textbooks, my sculptures investigate processes of servitude and freedom present in manufactured objects and settlement histories.
The meridian system in Chinese medicine is a network of internal bodily pathways through which energy flows through. These channels are animated via reflexology, a therapeutic practice in which applied pressure to the body through massage or with physical tools aids internal functioning. Ambiguous in shape, I view these often zoomorphic implements as subversive manifestations of the human urge to manipulate reality, existing as mechanisms for a dispersion of pressure and thus, power.
My work exists in layered levels of control- arranged sculptures consist of glass, porcelain, and soap castings, objects with burned or stained surfaces, or tools left untouched. Massage objects, kenzan (devices used in Japanese floral arrangement), photo holders, and combs, are placed in novel arrangements. Designed to rearticulate musculature, flowers, photos, and thus memory, these tools are now rendered obsolete; mounted on walls and strewn along the floor. The creature-like tools are returned to an imagined playground wherein the objects exist in a field of fantasy, liberation, and desire, themselves now operating free from subjugation.
Compositions made of snippings sourced from personal and inherited Japanese language textbooks confront attempts for kinship within Japanese American and Japanese Hawaiian communities. Rather than meeting this ephemera with a yearning lens of unconditional nostalgia, I evaluate historical instructional books as mechanisms for assimilation and settlement, particularly in early 20th century Hawai’i. Contemporary textbooks are disassembled, contending with unstable elements of cultural affinity in the 21st century. Through re-presenting textbook imagery, I confront these identity’s fluctuating placements on often unconsidered grids of incarceration, persecution, and influence of the American and Hawaiian landscape.