Roger Shimoura: Mistaken Identity
January 27 – March 10, 2017
Macalester College’s Law Warschaw Gallery, together with the Twin Cities Japanese American Citizens League, are pleased to present an exhibition from prolific American artist Roger Shimomura. Throughout his extensive career, Shimomura’s work has provided stealth commentary addressing sociopolitical issues of ethnicity. The exhibition includes a range of works on paper from the past 25 years which point to the history and confused ideals of racial exclusion in America.
Several bodies of work within the exhibition – Minidoka on My Mind, Minidoka Snapshots, Yellow No Same, and Nisei Trilogy – draw upon the artist and his family’s experiences while incarcerated at Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho, one of the ten concentration camps wherein Japanese Americans were detained by the United States government during World War II. These recollections offer a glimpse into the humility of the camps and the resilience and commitment of the citizens detained, who embodied and honored their American identity despite the cultural ignorance which characterized, and continues to characterize, Asian Americans and their status within American society.
In these works, Roger constructs a hypothetical history based on research from his grandmother’s diary, public archives and photographs, as well as his own family photos. Roger reveals the dismal conditions in the camps idealized through a traditional Japanese ‘floating world’ style. This visual separation from the historical event renders the incarcerated through an exoticized lens and leverages foils like barbed wire, windows, and mirrors, to heighten and question the separation between American-ness and Otherness. Using absurd caricatures, poignant humor, and riffing off of preconceptions for ‘what kind of art Japanese artists make,’ Roger catches us in our own judgements and misconceptions – a past, and unfortunately, present-day mistake.
Roger himself often appears in this work, at times as a young toddler participating in the ‘memory’ or, in more recent work, Shimomura inserts his own likeness as mature individual, or ironic ‘Asian Everyman,’ embodying or combating racial stereotypes in an effort to raise awareness about our notions of identity by using absurdity to demonstrate his outrage at racial misconceptions. Shimomura heightens these notions of identity by combining symbols of idealized American life, like Disney characters, celebrities, embedded with traditional Japanese iconography. For Shimomura, these conflated icons offer a tongue-in-cheek delivery of the patronization and sense of rejection he experienced from being deemed a perpetual foreigner in his own country.
Roger’s work, while fabricated, recalls a real historical moment, now 75 years ago, in which Japanese Americans were excluded from a general populous. These experiences continue to influence his investigations on race, identity, and their misconceptions, as he experienced them throughout his career. The exhibition presented now, in 2017, offers a strident reminder of the conditions for fear which might place false distinctions between Americans. |
