(Above: Mei-ling Lee’s installation, “The Lighted Window,” is based on a children’s story of the same name by author Jefferson Goolsby, about an unhappy child who wonders how others live behind their own “lighted windows.”)

By Randi Bjornstad

Five women artists — Kathleen Caprario, Sandra Honda, Mei-ling Lee, Charly Swing, and Kerry Weeks — have collaborated to create the “season opener” for 2022 at the Maude Kerns Art Center with a show titled Social Being.

Some elements in the exhibit have been created by individual artists, while others represent collaborations among two or more of the women. There is two- and three-dimensional artwork, as well as interactive performance pieces and installations.

All five of the artists are from Eugene.

The purpose of the show is to portray the concept of “social being” as it is experienced and internalized by women. Besides simply being by women, it focuses on questions common to them, including what it means to identify as a woman, to be viewed as “other,” as well as examining issues of social justice and social privilege.

In light of the continuing coronavirus pandemic, this exhibit may be visited either in person or online at the art center’s website, mkartcenter.org.

Here’s how the individual artists regard their contribution to the Social Being show:

Kathleen Caprario includes mixed-media paintings as well as videos and installations in her portion of the exhibit. She contemplates her identity and privilege as a white woman in society in relationship to today’s critical examinations of race, art, equity and physical and social place. Caprario draws on the work of three Oregon poets — Bobbie Calhoun, Benjamin Gorman, and Carter McKenzie — as she presents one poem from each, lifting imagery from each one in an installation she calls Patterns of Privilege — Now Hear This as she describes the way these poets have influenced her, both personally and creatiavely, with their words. Caprario, who displays her work regionally and nationally, used funds from a recent Oregon Arts Commission Opportunity Grant to support her effort for this exhibit.

Sandra Honda’s art, “Broken Promises, Broken Dreams,” reflects the lives of Japanese-Americans during World War II

Sandra Honda uses drawings, digital art, and installations as she examines what it means to be Asian and American in the United States today, especially in the context of the imprisonment during World War II of people of Japanese ancestry as potentially dangerous “others.” Honda herself is sansei, defined as the third generation of Japanese-American people in a family. (The lineage begins with nisei, referring to people born in Japan who relocate to another country, issei to their children who are born in the new country, and sansei to the third generation of children.) Honda’s art addresses the deep trauma experienced by Japanese people because of forced mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans by the U.S. government in concentration camps during World War II, resulting for most in the loss of their pre-war homes and livelihoods. Her installation feataures photographs by Dorothea Lange and other photographers who worked for the U.S. War Relocation Authority to document the incarceration of Japanese-Americans and includes a collaboration with with composer Mei-ling Lee that brings the experience to life through art, sound, and lighting. Honda has shown her work most recently in the 2021 Artworks Northwest Biennial in Roseburg.

Mei-ling Lee was born in Taiwan and is a musician, composer, and performer who uses electronic instrumentation to study and illustrate cross-cultural aspects of western and traditional Chinese music. She is on the adjunct faculty in music technology at Lane Community College and Oregon State University as well as a graduate student in Performance of Data-Driven Instruments at the University of Oregon. For the Maude Kerns Art Center show, she created The Lighted Windows, based on a children’s story by Jefferson Goolsby, faculty coordinator of media arts at LCC. The story portrays the life of a young girl in an unhappy home who walks through her neighborhood at night and wonders about the people living in the rooms beyond the lighted windows that she passes as she searches for her own place in the world.

Artist Charly Swing asked women to look in the mirror and draw themselves as they are and as they would like to be portrayed.

Charly Swing has prepared an installation that illustrates the stories of contemporary women as they reflect on their particular place in the world. These “actors” — Barbara Counsil, Patricia Norm Donohue, Sandra Honda, Cari Ingrassia, and Liz LaRue — all agreed to observe themselves in the mirror regularly, preferably daily, and then to draw the way they see themselves and to express how they would like to be seen. Swing, a figurative artist and sculptor and founder of ArtCity Eugene and executive director of ArtCity Oregon, has used these drawings to create an animated projection of the women’s self-reflections.

Every Word, by Kerry Weeks, links the brain and social cues.

Kerry Weeks is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes mixed-media sculpture, fashion design, metalsmithing, jewelry, and interior design. She calls her installation in the Social Being exhibit Modus Operandi, created in collaboration with Nathan Trowbridge, Graham Olton, and Laura Strobel. The goal of the installation is to enourage its viewers to apply their own brain’s modus operandi — defined as a particular way or method of doing something, especially one that is characteristic or well-established — in an effort to better contemplate the idea of oneness, as opposed to division, in human society.

 

 

Social Being

When: Jan. 14 through Feb. 11, 2022

Where: Maude Kerns Art Center, 1910 E. 15th Ave., Eugene (corner of East 15th and Villard streets)

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday; noon to 4 p.m. Saturday when exhibits are on display; the Social Being exhibit also is available online on the art center’s website.

Special events:

  • 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 20, a Zoom Poet Discussion with Social Being artist Kathleen Caprario and two of the poets, Benjamin Gorman and Carter McKenzie, whose work is included in the installation; register to “attend” at mkartcenter.org
  • 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 3, an Artist Talk with the Social Being artists’ register to “attend” at mkartcenter.org

Information: 541-345-1571 or mkartcenter.org

 

Artist Kathleen Caprario uses paintings and poetry to examine her own “patterns of privilege” as a white woman in modern U.S. society.