...lies Fukushima
My piece for the Elon Faculty Biennial 'Art Kit' exhibition:
braille text, scrapbooking embellishments
Scrapbooking embellishments serve to adorn experiences “preserved” between
the pages of ready-made scrapbooks: some moments from our past are made pretty,
while others are implicitly erased. In
the piece “Between Here and There Lies Fukushima” these embellishments are poetically
transformed into braille text on the gallery wall.
"Here" is vague, "there" is vague... where is Fukushima exactly? The text metaphorically points to
a kind of blindness and invisibility.
My work for the last
year has examined the ongoing Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan, a result of
the 2011 Tsunami. I have sought to
question and challenge the emotional distance and lack of awareness in the U.S.
of this global tragedy, which has surpassed Chernobyl in gravity and scope. The scrapbooking embellishments serve to ground
the tragedy in the personal (we are interconnected after all). Yet
simultaneously, the foregrounded “sparkliness” and kitsch sentiment act also as
a barrier, symbolically underscoring the challenge to emotional engagement with
catastrophe.
.
