January 12, 2006

Dittmar exhibits Taeko works

Some of painter and printmaker Tomiyama Taeko’s recent works will be featured in the Dittmar Memorial Gallery’s winter 2006 exhibition “Remembrance and Reconcilation.”

The exhibition, which runs through Feb. 12 and is free and open to the public, highlights Tomiyama’s serigraphs (a color print made by the silk-screen process and printed by the artist personally) and collages (an art form in which bits of objects, such as newspaper, cloth, etc., are pasted together on a surface in incongruous relationship for their symbolic or suggestive effect).

Tomiyama’s work deals with the themes of war and imperialism, beginning with her own life experiences during the past 85 years, as a girl in Japanese-controlled Manchuria, and then in wartime and postwar Japan. She asks viewers to remember the suffering of those whose lives were destroyed and whose stories were “silenced by history,” particularly wartime forced laborers. She has been active in bringing to light the suffering endured by thousands of women forced into sexual slavery by the imperial Japanese military during the Pacific War.

Drawing on multiple histories and artistic traditions, mostly Asian, but also Scytho-Siberian (a phrase that refers to central Asia, including Siberia, northern China and Mongolia, and the mountain region of Central Asia, at least as far as Iraq) her work imaginatively travels the world.

In addition to her painting and printmaking, Tomiyama also has collaborated with musician and composer Takahashi Yuji, to create multimedia slide presentations from her artwork. The Dittmar exhibition will present some of her most recent works, reconstructed around the theme of “remembrance and reconciliation,” including two of these collaborative projects — “A Memory of the Sea,” which focuses on gender and forced sexual labor — and “Harbin: Requiem for the Twentieth Century,” a meditation on the attitudes that protect perpetrators from recognizing their own cruelty.

The Dittmar Gallery is located on the first floor of Norris University Center. During the winter exhibition, the gallery will be open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.