January 12 – March 8
Cori Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade
Leech Gallery
What is an identity, but a story of self? As an artist with cultural ties to multiple empires, I am unwinding the mythologies of United States and Japanese nationalism that I’ve been taught, and am weaving new stories to tell about myself and my people. In the diaspora, I both yearn towards the past, longing for a stronger connection to my ancestors, and towards the future, desperately envisioning a future where me and my communities are rooted deeply enough in order to withstand the coming climate hardship. In this tension between past and future, I paint yōkai, the strange spirit creatures of Japanese myth.
Yōkai are not exactly ghost, or monster, or spirit, but a wide umbrella category holding all of these and more. I am drawn to these creatures’ tendency to inhabit in between space, and I paint them to help me release rage, evoke cycles, channel joy, and remember what’s been lost.
These paintings were originally commissioned as a set of 16 chapter headers for my sister Jami Nakamura Lin’s debut memoir The Night Parade (2023), published by Mariner HarperCollins. My goal in illustrating The Night Parade was to depict yōkai that had escaped the idealized, frozen concept of ancient Japan, and had re-rooted in the complexities of my second-and-fourth-generation Taiwanese, Japanese, and Okinawan American experience. Cori Nakamura Lin – Artist Statement
Kayla Bauer, The End of Somewhere
Hoffmaster Gallery
The End of Somewhere uses San Francisco as a vehicle to explore multiplicities of identity, memory, and history; Kayla Bauer works with photography, text, and found imagery to create fragmentary narratives that may or may not be rooted in reality. Bauer is currently completing a Ph.D at UW-Madison and her MFA thesis exhibition, I Left My Heart…, was awarded the 2022 Russell and Paula Panczenko Prize.
Organic / Inorganic
Kohler Gallery
An exhibition of sculptural works curated around Senga Nengudi’s multi-part A.C.Q. (Air Conditioning Queen), on loan from the Art Bridges Foundation. A.C.Q. is a mixed-media installation, composed of found metal refrigerator parts and donated second-hand nylon pantyhose. This juxtaposition of the rigid-industrial-abstract and the elastic-intimate-human give us a means to think through ideas about gender and resilience. Sculpture and installation pieces by Monty Little, Anna Campbell, and Callie Kiesow present similarly startling juxtapositions, with isolated elements of the human body paired with and disrupted by pattern and abstraction; they also offer expansive ways of thinking about how these formal cues signal larger ideas about identity and survival.