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Email PageHaruko Tanaka 2007
February 1, 2007- March 10, 2007
Reception: February 1, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Haruko Tanaka
CUE Art Foundation
511 W 25th St Haruko Tanaka (SOME OF) MY INHERITANCE: Noni’s seamstress fold (2007) |
California-based artist and activist Haruko Tanaka challenges the idea of fixed identity by exploring how cultural representation is largely a matter of negotiation in her current exhibition of video, photographs, a site-specific sculpture installation, and a performance at CUE. Having grown up in both England and Japan, and upon living in the U.S. for the least 13 years, her past work has sought to examine the lack of media portrayals of multicultural identity by investigating her place in the world. Her recent work re-addresses this imbalance by reflecting how the world fits around her.
In the series of photographs on view entitled (SOME OF) MY INHERITANCE, the artist explores how cultural identity is inherited through the adoption of certain family rituals and passed on through daily interaction with others. By focusing on the types of working folds employed within daily practices of her own family and other families, she highlights both the underlying importance of process as a common thread, as well as the nuance of the gestures behind these rituals. Her choice of format for photographs such as Mum's triangle fold for grocery bags, 2007, and Noni’s seamstress fold, 2007 further examines both the specificity and mutability of culture through the language of instruction. Duplicating layouts often found in Japanese cookbooks, the artist’s use of detail ensures a comprehensive reading, even though directions flow from right to left, and top to bottom. The transmutability of gesture is also an important underlying theme in 1,000 triangles for some peace, 2007, a suspended sculpture installation, which utilizes her mother’s ritual fold for storing grocery bags to create a beautiful ceremonial object that encompasses both tradition and vision.
Themes of cultural exchange are further examined through the four installments that comprise the artist’s ongoing video series on view. In From Ahmeh to Zushi Station, 2004, the artist juxtaposes Japanese phrases, imagery, and sounds, which appear in English alphabetical sequential order in a format akin to language instruction flash cards. In the most recent installment of the series, Tanaka deals with the themes of diversity of place and language through the contexts of disassociation and connection. Here, she conveys the distance between feelings, words, and images as transmitted through sounds including phone messages and footage including imagery of friends making free word associations.
Tanaka’s layered examination of identity through the metaphor of exchange presents a complex commentary on the transmission and interpretation of cultural practices. Through the process of observation, instruction, translation and transliteration of gestures, images, texts, and sounds, the artist creates a non-homogenous, transnational, multilingual and seemingly contradictory sense of reality, which fully explores both the gaps and links that guide the cognitive process.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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