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stephen ninota is a calgary-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice takes the form of long-term thematically

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interrelated research projects his work is physically and aesthetically diverse acquiring form to suit his

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subjects he employs a variety of media including miniatures wood carving found objects

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photography digital imaging text and time-based strategies his work explores

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questions of family life culture and place memory and identity steve received a bfa from the university

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of western ontario in london ontario and an mfa from the university of calgary

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currently he is the workshop technician in the department of art and art history at the university of calgary

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his ongoing ghost town project which he will speak about today is an extended suite of works that started in 2012

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elements of the project have recently appeared in solo exhibitions at the founders gallery of the university of

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calgary at the military museums in 2020 and at the royal ontario museum in

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toronto as part of the group exhibition being japanese canadian reflections on a

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broken world in 2019 ghost town was also included in the exhibition inheritance curated by

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lindsey sharman and myself at the art gallery of alberta which also featured works by

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deanna bowen adrian stimson and a.a bronson which recently closed at the aga

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a few weeks ago it was my great pleasure to work with steve on the exhibition at the aga and also to welcome him here today for this

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virtual talk about his work so thank you steve and welcome to our online aga platform

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i’d like to actually make a land acknowledgement i’m coming to you from the university of calgary

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uh which is located on the treaty seven lands which includes the blackfoot confederacy comprising the zika the

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county and kainai first nations as well as the tsutina first nation and estonia

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nakota including the chinooki bears paw and wesley first nations and the city of

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calgary is also home to the metis nation of alberta region 3.

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so i guess what i’ll do is jump right in with uh with my powerpoint presentation and i’m

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looking forward to any comments or questions that you have at the end so without further ado i’ll

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try to share my screen so there i’m hoping that that’s working sad

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seem okay right hey well thanks to you all for coming um the presentation is uh entitled ghost

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town the same as my installation and suite of works which katherine mentioned

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um [Music] i was uh very pleased to be included in inheritance it was a wonderful context

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for my work it was a real privilege to be included with deanna bowen with adrian stinson and a.a bronson

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in an exhibition that deals so eloquently with things that are close to my heart but racism

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family and community histories and those sort of lasting effects on the people who follow on

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so this is the title that i’ve been using for years um and i’ve sort of changed my mind about it

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this is what i usually call my artist talks representing personal solutions to expressive

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problems um i have to say that the work in the exhibition which started 10 years

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ago uh was very difficult to approach for me it deals with my own family

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history and the japanese canadian internment during world war ii or more correctly japanese canadians

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expulsion from the coast their detention and their subsequent dispersal across canada

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these are topics that were and are extremely fraught for me personally and they were problematic for me as an

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artist for a variety of reasons as you’ll see my work has not always been overtly political and it took me a

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long time to deal with this content with something other than anger with rage

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so to do justice to the content and keep it relevant i felt i needed to do something that would hopefully engage

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with the viewers in a meaningful dialogue something something more poetic

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so as it turns out this work has had considerable legs and is transformed with each showing so i’d like to share

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with you how i got to the iteration at the aga a bit about my research and a bit about

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some of my earlier work so here’s a better title you know how i

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figured out a way to say things that i felt i needed to say without yelling

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so this is a photograph by charles cousins of the work uh at the aga it’s

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an installation of 368 miniature shacks that are die cut

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from tar paper and hand assembled so ghost town is the name of the shack installation and the project suite that

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deals with the internment now the term ghost town actually comes from my own family’s usage in my

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grandparents generation it was a term referring to the internment experience not just the place where it happened but

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the overall the overall experience and i’ll come back to that a little bit later

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so at the back of the uh installation you’ll also see a second piece which is called ladder to the moon

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now it’s a hand planed uh douglas fir ladder it tapers to a height of about 10 feet

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and on the top is a paper mache sphere made out of mulberry paper so that’s the paper that’s used uh commonly for uh for

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calligraphy brush calligraphy and or uh brush painting

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so a video of the phases of the moon is projected onto the sphere

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um and it stands as a sort of a sentinel or time keeper kind of a big grandfather clock of sorts

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the form comes from two different family anecdotes one from my father

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who uh when he was a young man in uh in the camps was taken uh in a state truck

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overnight to an adjoining valley to pick fruit and to do so he would be standing

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on an orchard ladder which if you’re familiar with them they taper in much the same way as the ladder in the piece

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the second anecdote is from my daughter who when she was very little at one point asked me if i could build a ladder

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tall enough so that she could touch the moon so for me um it’s always been a figure of of uh

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not only the labor that you have to do but also of aspirations and hope

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but there’s also a connection with a 19th century saying uh for something which is impossible so uh

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building a ladder to the moon is something like building a transcontinental railway or uh you know

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a uh basically something which is very difficult to do and once you do it opens

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up an entire world of possibilities there’s also i realized later a

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reference to a very famous georgia o’keeffe painting

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so the video that’s projected goes through the 29 and a half day lean cycle of the moon

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in 29 minutes and 30 seconds or a day per minute so it moves almost imperceptibly

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the video was built from an apollo era moon globe which was given to me as a child

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i made it into a bump map in cinema 3 cinema 4d and and

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rotated a light so that it would go through the various phases

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so back to the ghost town shacks um there are scale models of the one and two family standard

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shacks that were used for housing uh the intern japanese canadians in bc during

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world war ii so the layout um is basically compressed it’s a but it’s

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very similar to what was used to organize the camps so for anyone who visited the show if

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you took a look at the area that the insulation occupied it’s about one quarter of the space of

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one of the small shacks so if you look at the left hand corner uh in the foreground that’s a single family

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shack you could have put four of them into the room where ghost town was exhibited

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and every one of them is just a little bit different right um

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so the manner in which we install these is uh and fairly intensive uh a crew of people and this is at the founders

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gallery this is uh ten friends and family uh sitting at tables for approximately

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to five days assembling little shacks and laying them out on the floor

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so i have to at this point give my thanks to the aga prep team

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so many of them helped me out doing this

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so here’s a little bit about my older work i’ve long been interested in installation in fact i’ve been doing

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this since i was in second year of my undergrad this is one of the older pieces uh in my

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catalog it’s called mercator’s projection of the mind it was an installation at a stride gallery in

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calgary the theme here was actually uh had to do with perception and

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understanding and what it involves is a map on the floor that’s projected

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through a steel sheet a hole in a steel sheet uh the map on the floor is actually a uh

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it’s a mercator’s projection of a brain map so it includes all of the uh the usual

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distortions of proportions that we’re used to when looking at a world map uh it’s centered around

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um the language centers so the plum bot that you see on the right hand side of

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the screen hangs over top of the language centers that allow us to to interpret or

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produce language

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later on actually i started to deal with for the first time overtly japanese content and

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i have to say that this this installation which was curated by christine zoyak at the nickel museum

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um was the first time that i’d done this it comes from a question that was posed

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during my mfa defense by professor arthur mishimura who asked me during the

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open question period what influence does japanese art and culture have on your work

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um that was a pretty pointed question and it’s just lucky that it was in the open session so uh you know my my being

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flustered didn’t fail me um my entire mfa defense had to do with the

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relationship of my work to the european tradition i hadn’t really considered how

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japanese aesthetics or japanese art influenced what i was doing so uh with this show it was the first

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time that i really started to look into it uh looking into little turns of phrase that i remembered from speaking

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to my grandparents looking at things that i’d always been interested in one of which was japanese

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gardening so the term invisible waterfall is a badly translated phrase

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from japanese garden for a rock arrangement or gardening for a rock arrangement that suggests a stream

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flowing over the rock face so um in my

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version of it what you’re seeing here are three steel bars cutting across a

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corner of the gallery uh with uh the top one holding an uncut

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roll of copy paper that runs through a paper shredder at the bottom

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so on the first day of the of the installation i actually ran uh the paper

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through to create the the uh the foam at the bottom

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so here’s a little close-up of that on the floor

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uh was a projection of a water pattern through two home-built

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gobo machines special effects projectors

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so this next work uh was included in a show curated by

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catherine crowston called the alien project at the uh former uh

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edmonton art gallery so this piece um had to do with some of my obsessions

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with truth or um hearsay you could say

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uh what i did was i combed through records of the shapes of uh ufos

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and pulled out a few typical uh typical forms and these i uh

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made into uh actual models that were turned on the lathe out of medium

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density fiberboard and then spray painted with uh with an aeronautical paint

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to make them silver so that’s what you’re seeing on the lower part on the upper part what i have are series

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of descriptions that appear to come from something like a bird watching book

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so what you would see is a photoshopped version of the illustration

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for each one of the species of a flying saucer

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and below it would be a text that described its physical features and what

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its call sounded like so the sounds that it would make a little bit tongue-in-cheek

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so here’s a close-up of the skipper

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later on i became interested in uh this idea of memory and how it was constructed and how it contributed to

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our sense of personal identity and uh through this i started working on

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a piece called the amnesia cases which i intend to continue working on

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there are 72 possible cases but i’ve only done a dozen or so

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so i’ve got my work cut out for me what you see here are actually two of the main cases on the right hand

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side which are card catalogs that include anecdotes and descriptions

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of uh various contents so like a library library catalog used to be

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so they look something like this so each one of them is cross cross

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referenced with several other cards and several other cases for vitrine this is actually the

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interior which was taken from um taken from uh dutch masters paintings of interiors

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particularly a specific vermeer for the floor

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so what these are are actually boxes uh that are lit from outside they’re

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they’re scale models uh on the interiors of various spaces none of which are

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occupied i was interested in the notion that uh if you put a figure into this

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space it would lock down the meaning and it would in some way prevent the viewer

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from projecting himself into into the space what i used for many of the models were

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places where i had lived so they had a kind of connection between my personal identity and uh and place

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so here’s one that’s an apartment that i used to live in in downtown calgary

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and here’s another looking down down the basement steps of a house i used to live

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so this is one of the ways in which i explore ideas i i often work in miniature

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because these are massive projects and it seems like i’ll never ever get them done if i

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i don’t make them a uh a specific size so i’m interested in the large-scale installations and

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these miniatures my method almost always begins with some form of

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research research into an idea that catches my fancy so one of them uh that was connected

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with uh with the ghost town project was uh the idea of japanese bridges the

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bridges have always had uh had around the notion of a metaphor for

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change in state a passage from one physical place to another sort of a liminal space

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now the interesting thing that i found was when you do a google search for japanese bridge the first thing that comes up is monet

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so here we go um now monet was in fact so interested in in japanese woodcuts and how to have

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a uh quite an extensive collection of them so on the left you can see uh hiroshike

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which is uh from monet’s collection and it’s a an image of a bridge he was so

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enamored with these constructed landscapes that at uh his gardens in

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cheverny he actually built a japanese bridge using more or less the methods of

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japanese carpenters and certainly the design that they would use to produce a bridge traditionally a lot of these flip

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bridges are um made so they’re an arc

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segment right so a section out of a circle and you can see when in in

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the two images of monet that that it does in fact inscribe part of a perfect circle

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when i started to look a little further uh i wanted to see what was at giverny today

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since they’ve done an extensive um they’ve done an extensive renovation of the gardens a sort of a living museum

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and this is what i came up with now i’m comparing the wisteria bridge which features so prominently in so many of

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monet’s paintings with the archival photograph on the left you can see that they look a little bit different and in

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fact the more photographs that i looked at the more i realized that they were certainly

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not exactly the same although the current wisteria bridge which

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is is touted as an exact replica but if you look at them and you do a

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little bit of analysis you can see um that it’s no longer the perfect art

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segment in fact it’s a sort of flattened parabola they’ve literally flattened the curve now i understand why they would do

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that it’s much safer for uh for visitors to try and walk across this thing

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but it does bring up the question of you know all the people who go to uh the

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gardens at cheverone hoping that they’ll be able to capture and paint uh what the master did and

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all of the paintings of uh the wisteria bridge are essentially wrong

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so uh what i began to be interested in is this notion that around this metaphor there’s a little bit of

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sliding of meaning there’s a there’s a sort of a uncertainty when it comes to what is

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true what is a model what is the original uh what is the meaning

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so one of the things that i did with my research was to build this uh this

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shadow box and i have a series of these there are about four of them now um this one is called

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japanese and uh you can see on the left hand side uh it’s a sort of a traditional craft to uh to build things

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out of uh hand cut strips or sticks architectural features and

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in both uh well in japan korea and china this is a this is a fairly well

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established craft um beginning sometime in the 1700s i believe

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uh possibly earlier so i built uh a replica of monet’s bridge

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for my own piece now the two abutments that you see there are uh two pieces of

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wood that are leftovers from the right hand side production so what you see on the

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right are a series of chairs one for each person in my family

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cut from a single block of wood a single stick of wood the bridge abutments are the pieces that

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come from uh in between and yeah they’re they’re saw cut and finished

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but what i’m quite interested in is the sort of meaning of the materials and the process so i tried to to bring some sort

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of a conceptual connection between how it’s made what it’s made of and what it’s meant to

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to reference a really good example of this is this piece called blackbirds part of the same

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series also part of the ghost town series so um what you see here is a box that’s about

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four feet long and on the interior are a series of sticks now those are

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bamboo skewers the kind that you expect from

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an oriental grocery store um and mounted on each one of the skewers

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is a miniature bird now these are micro miniature carvings of uh of crows

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done in maple so i’m using materials that are native to two different continents uh they refer to two

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different cultural contexts there’s a little bit of a close-up

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so these these small boxes or or a modest size miniature pieces are a way

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that i use to to work through ideas now uh one of the things that i was most

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interested in was uh how japanese imagery comes into you know my circle of

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understanding or you know the the western culture in which i live

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and the one piece which is recognized by everyone is this one which is

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under the wave of kanagawa by 1831

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marvelous piece uh extremely powerful it’s lampooned it’s used in all sorts of

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cartoons i’ve seen a godzilla version of it i’ve seen a ramen version of it

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so so this is an image that’s everywhere um it always speaks about the power of of

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circumstances beyond your control of nature versus

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the puny humans in the foreground um one way in which i understand things is

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is through the formal means that are employed in uh in producing peace this

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this isn’t just an image it’s it’s also a composition that carries a lot of

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power there’s almost a fist-like or hand-like uh motion from left to right

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with the wave what i look wanted to look at was how could i actually incorporate that

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kind of composition and asymmetrical composition so what i did was i analyzed it

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in order to slow down the movement so i could understand it a little bit better i stretched it out and then i broke it

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into its its various sections uh so what you’re seeing are registers of the

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composition through a compositional analysis uh this would form the basis of

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my own composition for a long box and what i ended up with was

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this right so this is a piece called the great wave

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now it comes from not only that composition but from a couple of other sources um for people in my generation we’re

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experiencing a situation where we begin to to have to uh clear out our parents houses it’s

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it’s a difficult uh it’s a difficult and crushing

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sort of activity to to go through um it’s it’s uh

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something which i’ve actually been participating in several times i’ve cleared out my my own parents place i’ve

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helped other friends clear out their places on one occasion a good friend of mine um

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asked that we that i help out with clearing his parents place and in

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the basement were a whole series of storage shelves and the storage shelves

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all contained not materials for everyday use but things which have been stored away

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for use eventually so when uh so-and-so retired

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they would uh they would um be engaging in this craft or or this past

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time and so all those materials were stockpiled in the basement there were

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uh there were containers to be used for when uh friends came over when when there was an occasion

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and there would be you know some kind of entertaining going on but there was shelf after shelf after shelf of these

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materials and what we needed to do was to go through them for a garage sale

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it was a hugely daunting task but of course it’s something which which

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has to be done and so uh that’s where these forms came from they’re uh tiny tiny uh laser-cut

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models uh that are hand-assembled and then arranged in this way um

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using that that composition from a great wave uh one thing that’s happened ironically is

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that it has been damaged in in transport and so i’m still in the uh

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still in the throes of reconstructing this piece so it’ll it’ll be rebuilt

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someday soon hopefully one of the things that i noticed as i

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was working on this is that there was a secondary reference uh you may recall

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this image um from the 2012 tsunami um

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it became something of a shrine this was the disaster management center at inami

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and it’s uh it’s legend is that uh the civil defense workers who are

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coordinating evacuation of the town stayed in this building until the wave

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came and literally washed them away uh and so this this has been preserved

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since then i’m not sure what’s happening with it today but it’s it’s uh the plans

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were that it was going to be preserved for posterity

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it’s a very strange thing that we use this uh sort of modernist uh cube shape with rectilinear

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construction over and over again for for so many things

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so there’s a close-up of the interior of that box

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so moving on to to ghost town again um i’d like to show you some of the research that went into this piece that

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that that kick started with uh so a bit about family history and a bit about the

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japanese canadian tournament along the

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way so for those of you who visited the show you would have seen this uh this image as you entered the section with

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the ghost town piece and it’s it’s actually a blow up of uh my grandfather’s

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uh identification card where he was identified not as a landed immigrant but as a japanese national

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um so this is this is the old fella i remember him of course much older and it was startling to me when i when i found

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this to realize that he was about my age uh when this was taken it it really sets

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you back to think what would you do if your livelihood was taken away if

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your family was gathered up and you were incarcerated it’s uh it’s stunning and

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really difficult to imagine or understand what he went through

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and then on the back side sorry the back side is his uh his physical attributes he’s not a very

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not a very tall person um and i had no idea that he had a scar below his left ear

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so this is him in happier days outside of his business he was a baker in uh in

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powell street in in vancouver and these were the these are the folks who worked

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with him or worked for him

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so uh in march of 1942 um after after

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um pearl harbor the uh notices went out that everyone had to

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register who was a japanese racial origin and uh within a few weeks

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basically uh by by uh summertime

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um everyone had to move away from the coast so you can see there’s a listing there

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of all of the uh the prohibited zones essentially everyone would have to move

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at least 200 miles away from the coast

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so from the uh nikki internment memorial center at new denver bc i’ve always felt

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that this is a really good summation of the numbers uh involved so the internment itself

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lasted uh from 42 to 1946 so

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considerably after the war uh at the end of that period there was

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an attempt made to repatriate all persons of japanese heritage to war-torn

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japan in other words rather than resettling and or allowing them to return to bc

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there was a movement afoot to send them back to japan uh which had just lost the

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war now a number of people actually did go uh they certainly weren’t welcome you

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know uh these are these are people the children certainly had been growing up outside of uh outside of japan they

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weren’t considered to be desirable or even fully japanese by some

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so this is one of the uh this is one of the images that was in my my grandfather’s possession these are

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buddies of his uh at uh part of the the camp crew

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who uh built pop-off camp so he’s i think the person who’s taking the

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picture so the camps were built hastily by a japanese canadian cruise through the

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spring and summer of 1942 some of the locations for the internment

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camps in bc um were actual ghost towns so this is uh

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an overhead view of sandon um from uh again the nikkei internment

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memorial center archives now this was a rundown basically

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abandoned silver mining facilities so uh it was quickly

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renovated so that people could live there the majority of the camps though were

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purpose-built and this is the one where my my father’s family uh were interned in fact if you count up

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from the bottom in the first row closest to the uh the street

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uh there uh in the second row in the second shack

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back now my grandfather actually was in pop-off for the entire war he was there

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when when the um when the camp was built because he was one of the camp cooks

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one of the first camps that was built is uh is actually

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and so this is an image from tashme camp um if you’re wondering where that word

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comes from it’s actually an acronym it stands for taylor shiraz and me

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who are the three leaders of the bc security commission it does make you wonder what kind of person uh names an

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internment camp after themselves now uh attachment camp was a little bit

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different from some of the others as the first one builds it it actually had a bit of barbed wire around it and

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had a guard tower which you can see uh they realized that the rest of camps were so isolated that if uh if you ran

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away from one chances are you just die of exposure you’re in the middle of nowhere

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but the middle of nowhere is sometimes quite beautiful um this is the slocad lake at rosebury

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which is the first place that my mother’s family was interned at uh i i

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feel as though uh the camp was basically right on the shore so uh the vantage point here was

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probably pretty close by to where where the shack was that uh that one my uh mother’s family was

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inhabiting there’s not much left there in fact most of the camps have disappeared they were

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bulldozed in 1947. so again from rosebury this is a foundation that’s left over of a bath

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house that was built by the internees probably around 1943.

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one of the few places that you can go and actually see the shacks is

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is actually new denver bc so that’s where the nikkei internment memorial center is and in uh

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2011 i believe um mark hutchinson and i good friend of mine went to uh went to new denver to

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take measurements and photograph uh the remaining shacks

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so this is the beginning of the interpretive center this is their their main shack and it’s uh it is actually

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set up as though it was a 1942 shack so uh from the beginning of uh of the uh

35:52

tournament you can see what it is is a simple place built uh out of timbers with clatters on the

35:57

outside just like that now unfortunately um they were built out

36:04

of green lumber and the winter of 1942 to 1943 was particularly severe as you

36:10

can see from from the image here um the shacks were heated by pot belly

36:16

stoves and what with the green lumber what the end happened was cracks appear in

36:22

the walls and you can see that one inside the shack is is about half an inch or three quarters of an

36:28

inch wide so the wind would blow through these these uh walls into the

36:34

into the interiors and that’s where uh the tar paper from

36:40

my shacks comes from the story goes that my grandfather on my mom’s side actually

36:46

got a hold of some tar paper from one of the shipments for the camp a number of people did this

36:51

and uh because the snow was so high on the outside for that first winter he put

36:56

it up on the inside so you can imagine what that was like with the blackness

37:02

and the smell of tar what i began to be interested in was these anecdotes from my relatives and i

37:10

realized after my grandparents had passed that i really didn’t have that much time to gather those up

37:17

from my own information and not just as grist for the mill uh for for making

37:23

this body of work so i started asking my relatives for their stories um i asked uh my mom in

37:30

particular what she remembered and one of the things that she mentioned was you see that that sled that’s there that

37:38

wasn’t for play necessarily uh there were a number of these that were built out of packing crates and everybody

37:44

needed one my mom remembers in the dead of winter having to take buckets of water from uh

37:52

from the pump back to the shack and she recalls at one

37:57

point uh as she was pulling her her sled the water was spilling out getting onto

38:02

the runners and sticking that sled to the snow and as she pulled it she dumped

38:09

most of the water out when she got back uh my grandmother just sent her straight back out again so this is this is a 10

38:16

year old’s job is to get the water to make dinner to make rice

38:22

so the piece that ended up coming from this is called rice sled so it has a soundtrack of a young person

38:29

trying to haul a heavy load through the snow it’s uh it’s an antique sled sitting on uh on a pool

38:37

of rice with uh with buckets of water

38:43

so from the measurements that we did at new denver we did measure drawings and

38:48

that became another point at which i could ask relatives okay what was it like inside of there where where was the

38:54

bed where were the sinks now these uh these were standard shacks but none of

38:59

the original blueprints exist i went looking for them in uh in the uh

39:06

the bc archives and uh the ubc archives they’re just not around

39:12

but some of the original shacks are so and they’ve been turned into uh holiday cottages which is great uh this is a

39:19

cottage in uh in new denver so one of the first pieces from the

39:24

ghost town suite that i built was uh was this one called the roseberry single and it’s a

39:29

it’s a scale model of the shack inhabited by my grandparents

39:37

so uh if you get up close to it uh you can hear the sound of my mother washing

39:42

rice so to build these tar paper shacks uh i

39:49

had them actually die cut out of tar paper now there’s not too many places

39:56

that can still do this uh this this was done by the folks at western paper box

40:03

in winnipeg manitoba um they were established in 1921 a lot of

40:09

their equipment comes from that era so they they took my my digital drawings

40:14

and turned them into uh into actual uh paper cutting dies and ran them

40:20

through ancient machinery to produce uh something that looks like this so this is this is what the shacks

40:27

look like up close um each one is hand built and it’s up to the person who builds it how well they

40:34

build it and uh you know whether the door is open or closed and so each one is slightly different

40:43

so just as i’m sort of finishing off here i want to show you a couple of other

40:49

iterations a couple of other versions of ghost town because i’ve been i’ve been showing this work for about 10 years now

40:56

uh and it becomes it’s different every time so the first time

41:01

was actually at the old stride gallery again um the context was set up with uh by a

41:08

terrific interpretive article by my friend diana sherlock uh you can actually get a hold of that article um

41:16

from the stride website it’s still posted i believe uh and so that’s that’s the show and you

41:22

can see uh a better version of of the uh the latter to the moon in the background

41:28

um this is the fewest number of shacks that i’ve ever shown so a very narrow

41:35

space so later on uh it was shown again and again so uh ladder to the moon is here

41:42

uh at my winnipeg the artist’s choice it’s a plug-in ici in winnipeg when i was

41:49

living there and later on i got the chance to take it

41:56

back to dc and this was a very interesting experience for me um i took it to the

42:02

nikkei national museum which is in burnaby bc and we did the installation without the

42:08

uh without the latter but with the uh with the projection which i thought was

42:14

a really very effective way of getting around the problem that the ladder wouldn’t fit into the gallery it

42:20

was too tall at the same time i uh went up to new

42:27

denver and returned to the return to the internment uh site

42:32

um later in the internment actually my mother’s family moved

42:38

to new denver so uh we put this up in the cohan memorial gardens in new denver bc

42:45

uh with um a crew of community members not not just not just people from the

42:51

gallery but but actual community volunteers now new denver is one of the few places

42:56

where japanese canadian families were allowed to stay in bc and they actually

43:01

stayed at their internment site largely it was families who had people

43:08

who had tb and were not movable had to stay in the

43:13

sanatorium that was established at new denver so there are still

43:19

japanese canadian families from uh from the wartime living there so what we do is we put the

43:28

shacks together in a kind of a communal bee and i’ve begun to think that this is

43:33

sort of an integral part of the project it’s sort of a relational kind of event

43:38

uh in each show that involves uh you know like direct discussions with the people who are helping to build

43:45

uh build the installation uh it’s sort of a direct participation of some

43:50

audience members so in the in the past um usually it was artists and student

43:57

volunteers or i hate to say it i’ve tapped my family members on teen times to do this

44:03

uh in new denver though um it was people from all over the community and tourists

44:10

and it also included some japanese canadian elders from the families that lived in

44:16

new denver and it produces different discussions very very interesting discussions about

44:23

uh what’s what the work is about what the experiences were uh oftentimes people

44:29

who help out aren’t very well versed in what happened during war

44:34

what precipitated the internment

44:42

so at the royal ontario museum i got to participate in a show with other japanese canadian artists which was

44:48

which is a really interesting uh process again and once more we had a series of

44:56

volunteers from around the gallery most recently before inheritance it was

45:04

shown at the military museum uh in calgary for uh in 2020 which was the

45:09

75th anniversary of the end of world war ii and it was shown

45:15

with uh with photographs and uh and artifacts that contextualized the the

45:22

internment so what you see here um in the uh left

45:27

vitrines are actually objects from my family that came through the war

45:33

clearly there aren’t too many uh you were allowed a maximum of 200 pounds per

45:38

person but it was really whatever you could carry

45:47

so this is uh this is the the show at the founders which uh had a lot of floor

45:52

space and i actually showed the maximum number which is about 600 of the shacks at the same time

46:02

and now back to the aga show so i really want to thank the ago aga um

46:09

curator lindsay sharman and catherine croston and the staff and preparators uh without

46:16

their help i would have had nothing to show and i’d like to thank you all for attending uh and we do have about 10

46:22

minutes for questions so maybe i’ll start off just

46:27

to keep things going you mentioned in your introduction um

46:33

the question of rage and yelling and then you never came back to it i didn’t

46:39

did i no no you didn’t and so and i i can understand why i mean it’s not always something

46:44

that one is comfortable talking about but i guess i just wonder growing up whether

46:50

that was something that you felt from your grandparents and your parents or whether that’s something that you came to later when you began to do research

46:57

it’s it’s something that i came to i i was always kind of surprised at how

47:03

um my grandparents basically sort of shrugged their shoulders it’s like it’s something that happened you

47:09

know i think i think my parents were you know more angry about it

47:16

when i started to learn about the details of it it just incensed me because it was it was everything

47:22

that we’re told shouldn’t happen in you know canadian

47:28

society it’s like we’re we’re supposed to i grew up in the era of all of the uh i used to call it

47:34

propaganda but but popularization of this idea of a cultural mosaic

47:41

where everyone um brings whatever whatever their background is and is

47:46

allowed to celebrate that and it becomes part of the fabric of the society that’s

47:51

that that’s what the official line i was hearing and yet i heard this story

47:58

that was basically um you know their their lives were taken away

48:03

by a combination of racism and greed and and uh yeah that made me that made me

48:10

personally uh really really angry it was difficult if i i tried a couple of times to make

48:16

work based around that that that feeling or that notion and and um

48:22

i i never came up with anything that uh was

48:29

it was therapeutic for me maybe but not something that was relatable to anybody else

48:35

[Music] yeah it’s interesting that and i think that you know the work

48:41

in itself is quiet right it’s not it’s not um yelling it’s not loud it’s not um

48:49

in your face in that sense even in even in in the addition of documents and photographs and some of the other iterations the work itself is very quiet

48:57

and so i think that there’s maybe do you do you think that’s about emptiness and loss perhaps that

49:04

that you’re trying to to address it’s yeah part of it it’s uh sort of a

49:09

grieving uh and a remembering of something bad that happened um so it’s

49:14

not forgotten um the intent though isn’t that it’s pointing figures although you

49:19

know i i definitely still do that i point fingers at the vc security commission

49:25

um you know it’s uh it’s one of those things i’ll point fingers at politicians

49:31

but um for for me it it’s just trying to come

49:37

up with a translation i i i sort of use my uh grandmothers as a kind of example

49:45

of of how they conveyed that experience it wasn’t about

49:50

blank it was it was actually about this is this is something hard really hard that happened to us i think

49:58

like my dad in some ways felt a little guilt about it because he told me once it was kind of like

50:05

going to summer camp for several years you know you’re a young fella

50:11

you’re doing all these cool things and you have freedom that you maybe wouldn’t have had if you lived downtown in

50:18

vancouver um because nobody was guarding them

50:24

the kids could they could wander off they could go over to the next uh camp and that sounds kind of idyllic

50:30

uh i think it wasn’t for the parents who you know had to think you know what’s

50:36

gonna happen next you know and they did they had to start from scratch when they got out

50:42

yeah and i think the difference being the parents understand economic loss they understand

50:48

the loss of community they understand um they understand the fear of not knowing

50:53

of uncertainty which children probably are protected from in some in some respects we do have a question in the

51:00

chat um and it is thank you steve truly appreciate being invited to hear about

51:05

your work uh my question is how do you communicate your feelings about this history

51:11

specifically with new generations what do you want them to take away

51:16

what do i want them to take away um it’s like it’s an acknowledgment of something

51:22

wrong in the past and when we see it about to be repeated for instance target shacks

51:29

haven’t gone away refugee camps haven’t gone away internment hasn’t gone away it’s it’s a

51:36

repeated trope through multiple societies uh who style themselves as being you

51:43

know progressive even right um so i i think the more that younger people

51:51

understand about this uh the better so i mean um

51:56

maybe art visual art is not the best soapbox but it is part of that consciousness

52:02

i know with my own kids we we’ve talked about this uh when i was a kid the dinner table was

52:11

not a place where that conversation happened right uh and i think in some ways it needs to

52:18

be right uh getting the stories from my my parents it was always a little bit

52:23

off hand there’d be a bit of a recollection at a particular moment and they

52:29

tell me about something but it wasn’t until later as i got older that i started to ask the

52:35

questions myself so if there’s a takeaway it’s it’s to

52:41

get people to ask questions you know to not simply accept and to remember how things have gone in the

52:48

past i hope that answers the question yeah

52:54

okay there’s no other question so i’m gonna ask another one um i was interested in your comments about arthur

53:00

nishimura and the question around japanese aesthetics and it’s interesting that to me there’s

53:05

a difference between aesthetics and histories or culture and i think um so i’m interested in the

53:12

work that you made the waterfall work with the paper and whether and the work that you’ve made

53:18

subsequently i mean the relationship to hokusai and um some of the other works whether it it’s

53:24

about aesthetics or is it about culture um in some ways i feel

53:31

rather divorced from japanese culture i mean one of part of the fallout of the

53:36

internment is a lot of people in my generation we didn’t learn to speak japanese

53:42

uh there was a sort of uh suppression of your japaneseness

53:48

and i i think part of that was the idea that you didn’t want to stand out so you could be picked out of the crowd again

53:55

right so so a lot of the japanese families after the war they did they they didn’t settle in the same

54:01

neighborhood they spread themselves spread out a bit it’s harder to hit us if we spread out a bit

54:07

so i feel that kind of a a little bit of a

54:12

a little bit of a separation between me and specifically japanese culture but i

54:19

think that there’s there’s a kind of um there’s kind of seeping in of japanese

54:24

aesthetics i mean you can’t get rid of it in you know all of my you know

54:30

experiences with my parents and my grandparents there was something different about the

54:36

way that uh the way that they approached stuff right uh and

54:41

what i started to do was to look at okay well what are my influences you know is there something that’s identifiably

54:47

sort of japanese in my aesthetics and can i through research get back to you know

54:53

where that comes from does that answer the question um yeah i think so

55:00

yeah i think so i think the the waterfall uh work reminds me of um

55:07

i don’t know if you’ve ever seen those japanese noodle fountains yes right yes right it reminds me of the noodles

55:14

coming down the trough in the in the water and the yeah absolutely right and there’s these

55:20

there’s these odd ways that it uh that it connects um i was also really interested in the fact

55:27

that you know i can’t read any of the articles about these things

55:33

in japanese i have to read translations and sometimes the translations are terrible and i can tell just by reading

55:40

them in english that they’re back so i got interested in you know a translation as being the place where i

55:46

lived right like it’s a bit of a translation everything is is uh second

55:51

hand now when i say that i don’t mean that it’s it’s you know not you know viable or valuable or anything

55:58

like that it’s just it’s translated right uh oh it’s seven o’clock so we should be

56:05

wrapping up but i’m gonna ask you one more question before we do there’s something interesting to me uh

56:11

in your fascination with boxes and i think there’s two i mean to me it brings together the two influences i think i

56:19

think the influence i mean obviously in japanese culture the box is a very very

56:24

important um object and there are boxes that are you

56:29

know contain many things and are gifted and you know the boxes is a important thing but also i know in your

56:36

earlier work joseph cornell has been an important influence so there seems to be something between

56:41

those two aesthetics that come together i think between cornell and japan and the box and how the box

56:47

can be both a moment in time but in some of your other work it becomes almost a narrative

56:53

of time yeah absolutely i mean the box is the

56:58

miniature for any space that can possibly exist uh it could be a conceptual space to be

57:04

an actual space um and it it gives focus to whatever is

57:09

placed within it and i’m as as interested in uh empty boxes you know uh cornell was

57:16

was not someone who always jam-packed everything into the box

57:22

um and there always does seem to be a kind of a narrative strategy there um

57:27

i i like it to be a sort of an open-ended narrative that the viewer has to uh has to

57:34

activate they can basically enter that box or that’s that conceptual space

57:39

from any direction that they that they want to right uh and there’s not a specific

57:44

now with the long boxes though uh there’s this real insistence on reading it from left to right

57:51

or right to left and tendency is left to right which i found really interesting

57:56

it was almost more like reading a line of poetry that it had to actually go in

58:02

that direction for it to make sense which is just considering in japanese

58:09

you read right to left yeah so it’s a kind of in inversion and assembly potentially an inversion in a sentence

58:15

although i think that we’re so in in western the western world

58:20

was so ingrained to move left to right left to right kind of constantly yeah now in when it when it’s placed in an

58:27

installation setting or when it’s placed in the setting of an exhibition oftentimes you can you can

58:33

short-circuit that because a particular room might might rotate in uh right to left

58:39

direction and so when they appear uh to the right of a door in an

58:45

exhibition oftentimes they do get again yeah yeah yeah interesting

58:53

so maybe i’ll ask one more time our audience if there are any questions you want to put up into the chat

59:00

and it doesn’t seem so so anyway steve thank you so much uh for sharing all

59:05

that with us today oh wait oh thank you for attending everyone so we’ve got to thank you uh to everyone

59:11

for attending and thank you to steve for uh the work that you had in the exhibition and then for sharing it with

59:17

us uh today and also uh sharing some of the previous work which i think really gives us some background and insight into you

59:24

know how your work is progressing and that it it in fact is not linear in a way it’s circular and kind of repeats

59:30

and returns so it’s really interesting to see that as well as in terms of an overall body of work

59:37

great thank you all for okay thanks for the opportunity thank you everybody and have a good monday evening

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