Ghost Stories: Jesse Ryan Kuroiwa's Tour of "Resurfaced" Japanese-American Internment Camps

Jesse Ryan Kuroiwa, Leupp Isolation Center, Leupp, Arizona, 2011.
Archival inkjet print, approximately 8" x 10." Courtesy of the artist.

I'm a fan of documentary photography. I love reading the stories in the images, the more complex the better. So Jesse Ryan Kuroiwa's November show at the ROY G BIV Gallery in Columbus immediately struck me as something special. In Resurfacing, he presents both barren desert landscapes and urban landscapes uncannily desert-like, for none of them—vast as they are—include people. They are as remote, dry, and washed-out as the plains of sand and sagebrush devoid of habitation. How do we know these are not merely landscape shots? Because he has captioned them, and his captions both identify places and serve as titles to the stories that accompany them.

Kuroiwa's sites, so impersonal in appearance, are all related by what has been erased: the Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in internment camps on these sites during the Second World War, and camp structures that held them.

Were it not for Kuroiwa's caption and the two-paragraph note that accompanies this photo, we wouldn't know that the image, left, is of the Leupp Isolation Center where "problem inmates" from other camps around the West were transported for discipline (read: torture) in rumored underground facilities. Lacking material evidence beyond these couple of disintegrating structures, how does collective memory last? How is history documented?

Jesse Ryan Kurroiwa, Golden Gate National Cemetery (Overlooking the Shops at
Tanforan), San Bruno, California), 2011. Archival inkjet print, approximately 18 x 23."
Courtesy of ROY G BIV Gallery.

The premise of this show is that physical evidence can indeed be blown away, knocked down, or resurfaced. In human cases, it can be silenced by violence or death. 

Kuroiwa's eerie view of the symmetrical, perfectly laid-out Golden Gate National Cemetery has a story fraught with invisible ironies. In it are interred the bodies of Japanese-American combat troops, men released from internment camps to fight in the War. The story he tells in the note to the images says that 14,000 such men fought, leaving their families behind in camps. Theirs was the most-decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of the military. Yet the Tanforan mall, beyond, occupies the site of the former Tanforan Racetrack, were Japanese-Americans were lodged in horse stables on their ways to permanent camps.

All the internment camps were situated in barren countryside—desert or scrubland that would discourage escape attempts. One of the aspects of the invisible story, though, is that the camp populations were not bent on escape, but tended to established their own well-organized, coping societies in accordance with gaman, the Japanese discipline of acceptance and hard work, a turning inward rather than to aggression. That civilized characteristic, too, has been scrubbed out of history.

Jesse Ryan Kuroiwa, Orchard, Manzanar Relocation Center [CA], 2011.
Archival inkjet print. Approximately 8 x 10." Courtesy of ROY G BIV Gallery.

The photographs in Resurfaced emphasize the sense of the missing by Kuroiwa's choice of points of view. These emphasize sky, distant horizon, or, in the Leupp photo, an upward leading line to a eternal vacancy, away from the ground under which men were tortured.

Kuroiwa's show wholly depends on the interplay of image and text. I took in the hazy, haunting photographs, which left me feeling a little disturbed, with more questions than answers about their significance. Turning to the texts provided shocks: The stories are always grim or heart-rending. They sent me directly back to the photographs, which were instantly filled with the stories that had been invisible before. The haze was still there, but the ghosts had souls; the sand was marked with footprints of women and children who planted gardens in spite of everything.  

The quality of the texts is as important as the elegance of the photography in a project like this. These two skills do not always coexist in visual artists, but Kuroiwa does well in most cases, maintaining a lapidary style that fits his purpose of documenting history in which he has investments of moral value and emotion.

Jesse Ryan Kuroiwa, Tula Lake Segretation Center, Newell, California, 2011.
Archival inkjet print. Approximately 8 x 10." Courtesy of ROY G BIG Gallery

Of the "Tula Lake Segregation Center," right, he writes:
"On May 24th, 1944, Shoichi James Okamoto was shot and killed on this site. Okamoto had been sent outside this camp to retrieve lumber by a construction supervisor. At the time of the shooting, Okamoto was attempting to re-renter the relocation center. The guard who shot Okamoto was later acquitted except for a $1.00 fine for unauthorized use of government property—the bullet."

Well done. It's a description brief and unadorned, as spare and cold as the image presented. He doesn't tell us about the weather: He lets our imaginations worry over the particulars; we inhabit both the photographed and unseen space. 

Here, the written and the visual meet the ideal of being equal partners. Neither, alone, could tell the whole story nearly as powerfully as the two. It's noteworthy that the artist provides with his statement a bibliography of recent historical research sources that inform his project, so we are not left questioning the veracity of his anecdotes. He notes when information is reported rather than documented. 

Jesse Ryan Kuroiwa, Heart Mountain Relocation Center,
Heart Mountain, Wyoming, 2011.
Archival inkjet print, approximately 18 x 23." Courtesy of the artist.

This show succeeds on so many levels. As unlabeled photography, it is haunting. The flat, seemingly featureless landscapes are imbued with life by incidents we would in other places barely notice at all. The splintery poles and the rusting tanks are focal points in apparent nothingness. Add the scripted stories, and those strange, scarce populations of indifferent things assume poignant and sometimes terrifying meaning: The documentary purpose is revealed, as is the passion of the artist. 

In his statement, Kuroiwa writes that he wants to translate the "Japanese facade of 'Gaman'...into the tangible shame, pain, and injustice under the surface." He's achieved his goal. He's done it not without exhibiting gaman himself, if that quality means facing hardship with self-control, kindness, and discipline. Resurfaced demonstrates all of those qualities. But there is translation too: By the end, we know who he is, where he stands, and just how he feels.

Kuroiwa's show remains at ROY G BIV through November 30, when there will be an artist's talk at 2:30 p.m.

Art for Community Expression, Enduring in Columbus

Art for Community Expression has mounted over 200 art shows in Columbus since it was founded in 1979 to assist African American artists develop and show their work, and to raise funds for trips to Africa. ACE's membership places self-taught and naive artists shoulder-by-shoulder with those trained in art schools and universities. The non-profit is an exemplary community cultural institution and a model of mutuality. It provides professional mentoring as well as social inspiration and support. 

April Sunami, Pensive One, detail. Mixed media, 10 x 8."

Pepper Johnson curated the current show, just opened at the ROY G BIV Gallery. Works by Kojo Kamau and Queen Brooks, two of the founding members, are included. So are pieces by Vivian Pittman and her mother, Barbara Thomas, two who have also been long prominent in the ACE community. Among the names of Columbus legends, though, are plenty of artists who have come to ACE at different points throughout its thirty-four year course.

April Sunami's tiny mixed media painting, Pensive One, seems a fitting emblem for the whole show. Against a background of gray tones, and outfitted in the same foggy shades, an alert young woman's head explodes with masses of color and texture. This is more than an afro hair style. It's blooming imagination, ideas, and promise—what takes one away from gray space. The  girl won't be pensive for long. She can maintain her stillness only so long before the tempest will propel her to a colorful place. She's the spirit of this show, the symbol of the need to express oneself through art. To turn oneself inside out to do it.

Karl Francis, Untitled #1. Black and white photograph, 14 x 11." Image
courtesy of the artist.

I liked Karl Francis's untitled photograph both for itself and for the contrast it made with Sunami's pensive girl, dreaming her actions. Francis's break dancing boy has  entirely exerted himself in body and passion.  He has created a situation virtually the opposite of the girl's. In his world, he is fully alive in his motions in the middle of a dance floor, while, all around him, people stare into the distance, check their telephones and appear too lazy even to maintain themselves standing erect. It's a great image of caring, engagement, and indomitability.

Bruce Robinson also models commitment and consequences in his wall-mounted wood cut- out, Pressure Points. Sawed from pressed plywood, Robinson's industrial material and the graphic boldness the design of his colors heat up the classical pose: A man bears his wounded brother to likely death. Under one foot of the rocker on which he balances is the word "Nature;" "Nurture" is under the other. The tattoo on his arm reads "NO MAS." A handgun fills the red "O."

Bruce Robinson, Pressure Points, oil and plywood,
52 x 35 x 1."

I love Robinson's blending of the urban and classical in this piece. The figures are placed in the pieta configuration, which reinforces the individuality and humanity of those shot and killed in the city. The artist has made a protest piece all the more potent because of its great heart and spirituality. Furthermore, he has made a work that is aesthetically fine. As composition, this is a satisfying study in line and color, in tension and relaxation as he ties, knots, and untangles limbs, lines, and colors from one another.

While April Sunami's mental dreamscape sets the stage for this show's thread about thought and action, it also suggests the strong motif of the lyrical that is so refreshing here. While there is plenty of work to remind us of racial and social issues, there is much that reminds us why hearts sing too.

Barbara Thomas, Eagle in the City, watercolor on canvas, 36 x 30."

 Barbara Thomas's Eagle in the City suggests that urban strength, order, and justice can prevail. The mighty eagle, poised before the flag that occupies a huge amount of literal and symbolic space,  reassures us. It's an avenging protector: a mighty angel with a sword of wrath; a righteous hero with super powers. 

Thomas paints in watercolors, not often seen on canvas this size. There is a washy appearance to the painting that is strangely complementary to the image of the mighty bird. The world protected strikes me as a city of pastel tranquility, to be kept that way. Its relationship to a city where Robinson's tragedy can occur feels almost impossible. Perhaps the eagle here is more to a guardian who prevents the marauders from coming to despoil a peaceful urban neighborhood in the first place.

Florstine Yancy-Jones, The Flower Garden, acrylic on canvas.

In a folkloric vein, Florstine Yancy-Jones presents an irresistible Flower Garden in which every flower bed blooms in happy simultaneity, all beneath a sky that reflects the floral palette below. This painting offers all the joy of work so literal that it cannot begin to represent what it takes such pains to imitate. What the artist gives us though, is so much better than reality: colors more saturated, details focused beyond the capability of the human eye to pick out, and a compositional perfection that fades when we awaken from the sweetest of dreams. 

Heath Allen Woodruff, Birds on the Mountain, mixed media, 24 x 20."

At every show I go to, though, I always ask myself—or a companion, to start a good discussion—which piece I would take home if I could. In this year's ACE show, I'd take the most colorful and ebullient of all, a painted wooden wall hanging by Heath Allen Woodruff, an artist until this moment unknown to me. 

The work is glossy, bright, and child-like. It is based on the sort of literalness that is endearing yet reassuring: The grass grows underneath the mountains that rise into the sky; the trees grow from the mountains and the birds sit on their boughs. It represents a known world in which everything is both literally and symbolically ordered. There is no imaginable way to go wrong. God is in His heaven and all is right with the world.

In this work, the natural order is expressive of human moods. The mountains are as happy as people with flower arms; with as many arms as it takes to express riotous joy over perhaps the color itself in life. 

Even to accept the mountains as mountains is to cheat ourselves of all the life contained in this piece. The extensive decoration of the forms could be read as fancy textiles with embroidered circles—fantastical burqas.  The "mountains" could be cities, or far-out apartment buildings in an ebullient society in a peaceful world.

The ACE show will remain at ROY G BIV through July 27. It's very rare to find a show like this because there are so few institutions like Art for Community Expression, which hold their arms wide open to anyone who defines him/herself as one who needs or wants to be an artist. Artists are people who  feel compelled to make art.

To anyone for whom art-making is a motive, goal, or aid, the rest of us can only offer applause. Criticism in the sense of aesthetic judgment is rarely of any value to any artist happy in and conscientious about her or his job. 

This is something I admire vastly about ACE as an organization. Making art is always a good thing, and ACE always pitches in to encourage anyone who wants to do it. So, in this democratic-minded organization, whose work gets in the juried show? The work with something to say that says it clearly and with conviction. At least, you see a lot of that in this show.