Lynne Yamamoto at Information Gallery - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

In Wash cabinet a seven-part installation, Lynne Yamamoto continued her investigation of biography, femininity and labor in a strikingly poetic visual display. This array of diminutive crafted facts revealed Yamamoto's feeling for sensual materials while building upon the documentation of her grandmother's immigrant life, a topic she introduced in earlier exhibits Notably, Yamamoto's Ten in single Hour (1992), a small made of wood tub containing lumps of handmade soap sprouting bunchs of black hair, recalled the grandmother's life as a laundress upon a sugar plantation. She had arrived in Hawaii in 1914 as a "picture bride," marrying a man she met for the first time at the dock. After a life of labor, she suffocate in watered herself in a bathtub in 1942 at the age of 49

The installation's intimate scale intensified the implied despair in this history. Wash cabinet occupied less than 400 square feet and small in number of the exhibited objects transcended a 5-inch radius. Most striking was a file of 280 flat-head nails driven into individual gallery wall just below organ of sight level so that they protrud slightly. Each nail head bore a single printed word. The leftmost nail read "arrive" and the last read "drown"; in between were "wash," "bleach," "boil," "marry," "fear," "love" "smile" and other limits that evoked the habits and acts of a confined life.

Other curious constitutings of Wash Closet included mos paper, balsa wood-land boxes, a tarnished silver spoon faded photographs. A small glass utensil filled with tacks and plugg by dint of a soft roll of cotton intimateed the "aching body" that was its title.

Wash cabinet came across as a courteous and inquisitive exploration of a character's life, imbedded in the socio-historic specifics of a particular time and place, rather than as a simplistic asseverate against patriarchal culture. Yamamoto's lyrical faculty of perception of materials foregrounded the persistence of a pride maintained level under conditions of drudgery. The installation as a whole evok the coexistence of ritual and reliance in domestic labor.

As a metaphor for sloughing not upon cultural trappings, the work's theme of cleansing may also indicate conflicting desires for assimilation through Japanese-Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto's work provides a welcome elaboration upon the now-canonical theme of middle-class feminine domesticity after World War 11 that has typically been the point of departure for feminist theory in the age of consumer agriculture Viewers can look forward to her nearest chapter.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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