Saturday, June 9, 2012

Visceral Memory

One needn’t live through an experience to store it within one’s bones.
Japanese American children born in the late 1940s and early 1950s inherited not only the trauma of their families’ incarceration in American concentration camps, but by the memory of the bright atomic flashes that ended World War II. Even if one didn't have family in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, the retinas of the imagination were irradicably seared.




Friday, March 2, 2012

Solo show: Ephemeral Allure at UC Santa Barbara Women's Center



Ephemeral Allure; Eternal Struggle
UCSB Women's Center, Nov. 2, 2011 - Feb. 3, 2012
Forty years ago, when Ms. magazine was founded and the Equal Rights Amendment sought ratification, women knew they were oppressed. The external barriers were well-defined: they were expected to be wives and mothers, discouraged from going to college, denied advancement in the workplace and reproductive control over their own bodies. The list goes on and on.  

Gains have been made, but true equality remains elusive. Today's barriers are much less obvious, and consumerist distractions are insidiously seductive.

These 39 artworks contrast my paintings from the early 1980s with recent photographs to ask "How much progress has been made? Can women really have it all? Or do we need to choose carefully what we buy into? The fight for true freedom begins within." 

Ephmeral Allure opening





When I was their age, sensible shoes and natural fibers were not a fashion statement; they were a  move towards healthy and affordable lifestyles. Today's young women may be liberated from corsets and pantyhose but are tooth whiteners and nail spas an improvement?