Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/22/2016
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Location
Littman Gallery
1825 SW Broadway St., Suite 250 --Portland
Exhibition Run: 11/22–12/4
By Appointment Only: 12/1–12/4
Opening Reception: Tuesday 11/22, 6–8 pm
Reception Itinerary:
*7:00–7:10 Artist Talk
7:15–7:30 Performance
7:35–7:45 Q&A
Suspended Moment: Activating the Nuclear Past + Present is an exhibition of Yukiyo Kawano’s life-size sculpture of the Little Boy atomic bomb. The exhibition’s opening reception culminates with performances by butoh choreographer Meshi Chavez, music by Lisa DeGrace, and poet Allison Cobb.
At the heart of Suspended Moment is pair of life-sized sculptures of the nuclear bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6/9, 1945. Kawano – herself a third generation hibakusha – created the sculptures using the kimono of her grandmother, stitched together with strands of her own hair. The sculptures meld generations of atomic bomb survivors’ DNA into haunting shadows of the instrument of destruction. Suspended Moment also features a performance of butoh dance, a post-WWII Japanese dance tradition that rejects Western influence and traditional Japanese form.
Suspended Moment demonstrates the incomprehensible, unimaginable horror and magnitude of nuclear war. The goal is to make plain the human impact of nuclear technology through a blatant and unavoidable display. By so doing we hope the project will inspire solutions to the nuclear threat.
Yukiyo Kawano is a third generation hibakusha (nuclear bomb survivor) grew up decades after the bombing of Hiroshima. Her work is personal, reflecting lasting attitudes towards the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kawano’s main focus is her/our forgetfulness, her/our dialectics of memory, issues around cultural politics, and historical politics. Kawano is currently living in Portland, Oregon.
Meshi Chavez is a dancer, teacher and choreographer. He is co-founder of Momentum Studio in Portland, where he teaches weekly classes. Meshi teaches Butoh and other forms of movement based workshops in the United States and throughout Europe. His mentors include Toronto based choreographer Denise Fujiwara, and Japan’s Natsu Nakajima.
Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press); Green-Wood (Factory School); Plastic: an autobiography (Essay Press EP series); and After We All Died, just out from Ahsahta Press, which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Cobb works for the Environmental Defense Fund and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-curates The Switch reading, art, and performance series.
The Littman and White Galleries are student-run exhibition spaces at Portland State University. Our mission is to provide tools for a critical experience of contemporary art for students and community members through comprehensive programming. We envision the Littman and White Galleries as centers for cultural enrichment where an indispensable art experience is accessible to all perspectives and levels of education.
Gallery site: littmanwhite.tumblr.com
Photo: Stephen A. Miller