March 20, 2004
March 19, 2004
March 18, 2004
March 17, 2004
Roger Shimomura at Greg Kucera, Seattle
On exhibit through Saturday, March 27, 2004:
Roger Shimomura | Stereotypes and Admonitions
This series illustrates incidents of racial insensitivity I have experienced during my life. Accompanying each painting is a written description of the incident that inspired the piece. Also included in this series are events that have affected the Asian American community on a regional and national basis over the past 60 years — essentially my lifetime. - Roger Shimomura
Posted by chrisashley at 12:03 PM
March 16, 2004
About the bodhi drawings
On November 22, 2003, at the end of the "Places I Have Slept" series, I wrote:
I have seen painting shows where a painter has a motif, a figure, a layout, and each painting in that body of work is just a different set of colors. Imagine any one of my drawings repeated ten or twelve times where the only real problem from work to work is color. This works well for some people, but I seem to have a hard time doing this. I've got to at least do enough of a significant variation from work to work so that I have no only a color problem but a drawing problem, a spatial problem, a scale problem, to work with.
This current series, "bodhi" [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10], began, and ended, as a conscious attempt to use, more or less, the same drawing over and over. Sure, there were slight variations in the borders and in how the central square, a kind of empty frame, was handled- darker or lighter, a complementary color, a single color, floating over or embedded in the ground- but basically, the main figure, four overlapping rectangles with a central square hole, was the same. Really, I'd never used an approach like this before. And there is the risk that one produces a product line- sweaters of the exact same cut in different colors. Whatever- sometimes you do things just to see what it is to do it, and what you get when you're done.
About the use of the bodhi as a subject, I'll let the Wikipedia speak:
Bodhi (Pali, Sanskrit: lit. (supreme) knowledge, Enlightenment., from the Sanskrit word "Budh") is a title given to the specific Awakening experience attained by the Indian spiritual teacher Gautama Buddha. It is sometimes said to be the attainment of complete and perfect sanity.In these drawings I wanted to find an image that had a kind of dynamic strength - movement, off-balanced catching, or balanced instability, or something continually righting itself- caught in that moment of being held in balance, a moment of stillness about to change again. The four rectangles were a solid structure, though not symmetrical, and and empty frame either floated over these rectangles, or appeared to be embedded in each rectangle, or even sat at a lower level. I liked those different readings. Stillness and movement.
Bodhi is attained only by the accomplishment of the Paramitas (perfections), when the Four Noble Truths are fully grasped, and when all karma has reached cessation. At this moment, all greed, aversion, delusion, ignorance, craving and ego-centered consciousness are extinguished.
See also: Buddhism and Nirvana
Posted by chrisashley at 11:43 PM