SWING

About

Dab Art is pleased to present SWING, by bay area artist Glen Moriwaki. This site specific installation will inaugurate the opening of the gallery’s new location in Downtown Los Angeles. Solemnly titled, SWING is a completely immersive exhibition examining forced relocation and incarceration. Drawing from his family’s experience during the Internment of Japanese Americans in WWII, Moriwaki takes on the empiricism of family separation from a child’s perspective.

A rectangular chainlink enclosure, topped with barbed wire sits imperfectly at the center of the gallery, containing within it a single wooden swing. While the exhibit’s focal point is eerily highlighted by an era specific lamp, the viewer is drawn to the light source, compelled to walk around the enclosure. As the sound of time ticks away and the observer’s eyes begin adjusting to the room’s dim glow, the the final dimension of the installation is revealed. In a monochromatic multi-panel format; depictions of birds in flight consume the gallery walls and surround the steel sculpture.

Using light and shadow, Moriwaki creates an unusual but implicit dimension to his installation. By stating the obvious, SWING initially deceives the viewer to accept what is indisputably at the forefront. Only as the viewer moves around the center sculpture in the area between the bird and cage, does the work’s final metamorphose take place.

Curated by Yessíca Torres de Marín

Artist Statement

During WWII my parents and grandparents were imprisoned, along with everyone else they knew on the West Coast, for being Japanese. (Decades later, too late for most, the United States Government issued a formal apology).

In the ensuing decades of their lives afterward, they for the most part never spoke of that experience. Oppression is not only imposed from without—it can be internalized. If so, how is one truly free even after release from bondage? How does one trust and move forward in life?

Because I was not a witness, my on-going series of artworks deals instead with the residue of injustice, how it affected ordinary people as I was growing up. The echoes of internment are subtle, layered, stifled. These works are made up of parts and fragments. I’ve variously employed collage, mixed media, multi-panel, and multi-media approaches to match the fragmentary way that information and emotion about my family’s lives during that time has come down to me—in snippets of conversation, in bits and pieces of memorabilia.

Up to this point I have used the images of birds-in-flight to explore the historical and familial experiences of Japanese American internment during WWII. Recently my focus has shifted beyond the Internment. This kind of ordeal has happened many times in the past and it happens now on our border and in many places around the globe. Once again certain groups are targeted, threatened with forced removal, and their loyalty questioned. Families are separated. The current artwork at Dab Art has become an installation sparked by the question: what happens to the incarcerated child?

Glen Moriwaki