Lisa Anita Wegner

Tag Archives: Japanese Paper Art

May 9, 2016 GROWTH by Akemi Nishidera

Akemi Nishidera’s love of all things paper began when she was a small child, and her grandmother would bring her gifts of origami and washi paper from Japan. After studying printmaking at OCA, she apprenticed in Japan for three years, immersing herself in the study of wash (traditional Japanese paper making). She then returned to Toronto and opened KOZO Studio Gallery, where she focuses on letterpress printing, and offers workshops on letterpress and book arts.

Growth, her new installation for Gallery 1313’s Window Box, represents a new avenue for her work in paper, using self-representations on paper to showcase a sometimes difficult, but evolving relationship to her own body. The piece graphically depicts the movement from rejection to acceptance, and the blossoming of the artist’s full potential once that goal is reached.

To see into Akemi’s process, inspiration, thoughts and motivation see her tumbler blog ahdoerei.tumblr.com

Curated by Lisa Anita Wegner for Gallery 1313.

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Tags: Book Arts, Japanese Paper Art

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• Posted under art installation ideas, art therapy, Gallery 1313, Love Letters

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• mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes

  Lisa Anita Wegner (°1973, Toronto, Canada) creates performances, installations, films and conceptual artworks. By parodying mass media by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society, Wegner makes works that can be seen as self-portraits. Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing.

  Her performances often refers to pop and mass culture. Using written and drawn symbols, a world where light-heartedness rules and where rules are undermined is created. By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, her works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.

  Her work urges us to renegotiate performance as being part of a reactive or – at times – autistic medium, commenting on oppressing themes in our contemporary society. By using popular themes such as sexuality, family structure and violence, she creates with daily, recognizable elements, an unprecedented situation in which the viewer is confronted with the conditioning of his own perception and has to reconsider his biased position.

  Her works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, she touches various overlapping themes and strategies. Several reoccurring subject matter can be recognized, such as the relation with popular culture and media, working with repetition, provocation and the investigation of the process of expectations.

  Her works are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. They question the coerciveness that is derived from the more profound meaning and the superficial aesthetic appearance of an image.

  -500 Letters