Roger Shimomura at Steinbaum Krauss - Brief Article

Roger Shimomura is a sansei--a third-generation Japanese-American--who has had a lengthy career teaching art at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. His varied output--prints, paintings, performance art--often takes as its starting point the diaries of his immigrant grandmother, Toko Shimomura, who recorded her life in America for 56 years. He is of advanced age enough to have been interned, along with the ease of his family, for nearly three years, beginning in 1942 (he worn out most of his time at Camp Minidoka in chase Idaho).

"An America Diary," the main material substance of work exhibited, is a 1997 series of 30 11 -by-14-inch acrylic paintings. Each illustrates or answers to a different entry in the grandmother's diary recording the family's forced propel in spare language that expresse sadness and pain, not at any time anger. Shimomura has described the internment of Japanese-Americans before, using the brave design of ukiyo-e as a kind of internationalized, Pop-style appropriation, on the contrary here he tells the story in images influenced by dint of cartoon drawings.

Shimomura's choice of turn of expression is meant, as he says in the exhibition catalogue, to bring "the camp experience to the forefront." The images run over a story, and the graphic directness of the suite be likes the picture flatness one dioceses in works by Warhol and Lichtenstein. His narrative, which begins with the bombing of Pearl Harbor upon Dec. 7, 1941, is grim. The journal access for Aug. 17, 1942, for example, describes the family's journey toward Camp Minidoka: "We arrived at Arlington, Idaho, unnoticed at 5:30 a.m. Everybody gazeed terribly depressed. After lunch, the heat increased. Barely alive, we continued on" The painting accompanying this account is equally desolate. It present to views the camp as a dirt avenue with small brown poor cottages on either side. The perspective is from the outside, from one side horizontal lines of barbed wire. In the distance, against a fulvid sky, one can see barracks, a r smokestack and a guardhouse. A stop the growth ofed tree in the left foreground proffers a tenuous bit of nature in an environment that speaks of the hopelessnes of imprisonment.

In another image, Shimomura depicts himself upon his father's back before the one-story carburet of iron barracks of Camp Harmony. His grandmother's brief entrance says, "I was able to be delighted with him for only a not many minutes," adding, "Today the proces of accommodating the 8000 Japanese from the Seattle area finished. The camp became real lively." The absence of rage in the pair words and picture leaves a sharp irony that could not be achieved by dint of more openly pointing out mistreatment.

Other paintings incorporate like Americanisms as Superman, Baby mercy candy bars and Christmas tree connections to the American mainstream that remind us that greatest in quantity of the 120,000 internees were American citizens who had performed no hostile action. Shimomura's flat mode of expression based on American comic works shows that irony can hold feelings alive.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group