Indelible Image
Artist Statement
Our exhibition, “Indelible Image”, is about images of a specific country at a precise time
eerily echoing other struggles, of other people, in other lands, within a weirdly
synchronistic world time frame. It is about a shared past, formatted in different grids,
coded in different languages, and read in opposing manners. It is about the intersection of
memory, time, and place.
The invitation to participate in the Tokyo Wonder Site Creator-in-Residence was a
wonderful opportunity for us to continue our artistic practice in a new cultural context.
Research is an essential part of our creative process but this was our first experience
working with a foreign archive. We allowed ourselves to be guided by our intuition,
beginning with an initial idea but permitting ourselves to explore the other tributaries that
inevitable open up as we deepen our research. We viewed thousands of images, made
selections, refined these choices, and upon further research discovered the complex
political and cultural significance of the images. We were particularly intrigued by
images that connected with our personal experience, images of civic and political issues
of the time period we were interested in, images that were part of popular culture and
finally, by seemingly dormant images. Entering this vault of information and exploring
its content, permitted discoveries that enriched our creative process, our personal
experiences, and our thinking about the geo political issues of the time.
So the series of paintings began as we stood in the vastness, that is the Tokyo National
Diet Library, and began our research of Japanese newspapers from a known position, the
dates surrounding Martin Luther King’s assassination. Working with a translator we were
interested in seeing how the images of the civil rights movement, that are an essential part
of our cultural DNA, were presented in Japan. This point of departure, in turn, lead to our
discovery of the pivotal importance that 1968 had for Japan - as it did for so many other
countries around the world. In the US, 1968 was a bridge between the civil rights
movement and the anti-war protest of the Vietnam War. In Japan, the youth movement
also questioned environmental issues and the country’s quiet aid to the American
government as they waged war in Vietnam. The images of student protesters clashing
with police is both specific to actions of the individuals in the photograph but also
represent an archetypal gesture of resistance mirroring those in Alabama, Chicago,
Prague, Paris and Mexico.
The exhibition thus reactivates images from 1968 (a date characterized by young people
and marginalized communities challenging authority locally and internationally) in a way
that allows the images to be linked and de-linked from their original signifiers. The
“Indelible Image” is both bounded by the mark it has left and free to float above it.
The paintings are a composite of two layers of visual information that become subtly
animated when viewed. The ground is an oil painting of the source image and just
centimeters in front of this, above this surface, is the actual photographic image printed
on transparent silk. The viewer looks through the silk screen onto the painted surface.
The formal layering of the work culminates in a painting that mediates between the
document, the event, the viewer and the interpretive possibilities that surround them.
What has been closed, filed in an archive, is now open, animated by the viewer who
ultimately shifts the relationships between the depths and the surfaces of the work.
We also found, as we sifted through catalogues of actual news photographs in the Japan
Times Archives, that upon first viewing some of the images seemed abstract, benign and
poetic but they were in fact loaded with cultural and political significance that we needed
to unwrap carefully. One such photograph, an 8” x 10” black and white image of an
island emerging majestically from the swirling pacific waves quietly referenced the
ongoing Japan – US relationship and a history that has been shaped by struggle and
displacement, ownership and repossession, surrender and reclamation. On the back of the
photograph it was noted that the image was taken on the day that the US returned this
strategic island to Japan as a quid-pro-quo agreement to silence protests against the
USA’s use of the military base in Okinawa during the Vietnam War. We present this
image in its own terms, aesthetics, melancholic and poetic.
Continuing our fascination with photographs taken as “evidence”, the images of a boot,
an abandoned car, and a composite photograph of the robber, led us to the December
1968, 300 Million Yen Incident - a crime that to this day remains unsolved but is widely
known in popular Japanese culture. In this instance, our choice, to create a series of
works based on these images, was not about a political subtext but about our shared
curiosity for this case, the radical success of the crime, and the traces and clues that
remain captivating.
The Tokyo residence greatly stimulated our creative process and creating this work
expanded our awareness of the role we play in recreating narratives that question the
American national agenda through images that were widely circulated in Japanese
newspapers in 1968 for example. But it was also a recognition of the critical questioning
that lies at the heart of our artistic practice.