Above: Wendy Kawabata, Stemma (Detail), 2006.

Dawn Black | Wendy Kawabata | Sabrina Lee | Suzanne Long Candace Nicol | Mel Northum | Jocelyn Shu | Corkey Sinks

Dawn Black

As a child I loved dressing up and was incessantly creating various costumes from paper bags, tissue paper, and fabric remnants. Though no longer using the varied colored tissues or brown paper bags, my purpose remains relatively the same; to create a portrait bedecked with the trompe l'oeil tactility of taffeta or a powdered face. My portraits are an amalgam of conspicuously described form via the directly observed world and various two-dimensional media such as: encyclopedias of historical costumes, neoclassical and mannerist portrait paintings, and the fashion/costuming depicted in magazines, particularly W, Harper's Bazaar, and National Geographic. I combine, rearrange and integrate present and past adornments to create an aggregate portrait that transgresses female stereotypes and celebrates femininity and tactile beauty.

I begin by selecting whose portrait to paint. It is important that my portraits are of women known well by me, namely close friends and myself. The portrait's facial expression is also of concern, as I endeavor to paint an ambiguous yet perceptive expression. Upon deciding which portrait, I festoon the portrait with a smorgasbord of fabrics, emanating lights, and garments found from the above-mentioned historical and cultural sources. Adorning the portrait transforms the pictorial space, creating an otherworldliness where the laws of gravity, naturalistic depth, and value are skewed and often ignored. The portraits become possible caryatids of their raiment as the space shifts between their heads' ability to structurally support the weight of a culturally amalgamated headdress and their being engulfed or overshadowed by it.

I look to many artists for inspiration, particularly Julie Taymor, Cindy Sherman, and Beverly Semmes. In addition to contemporary influences, the European tradition of portrait painting, particularly the Italian Mannerists and Ingres, inspires my painting's form. The Italian Mannerists use of slight disproportion, highly saturated color, and extreme tactile detail and Igres' use of shallow space and implied texture inform my process.

Dawn Black was born in Louisiana where she received a B.F.A. (1997) from Louisiana State University. She earned both M.A. (2000) and M.F.A. (2001) from the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History. Currently Black teaches painting and drawing at Los Medanos College in Pittsburgh, California where she is also director of the LMC Art Gallery. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Andrew, and dog, Newt.

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Wendy Kawabata

In my work I attempt to materialize links and fluctuations between cultures. I call into question the way my cultural history, which is rooted in the west, relates to the cultural identity of my family, which moves between east and west but is firmly rooted in neither. The imagery and materials are gathered from a wide variety of sources specific to either my historical and current identity or that of the mixed background of my family through marriage, motherhood and location in Hawai`i.

My work often acquires its meaning and strength through repetition of form and action. I use vernacular and domestic materials; form not commonly associated with each other create a spark from their contact and the process of making comes to bear as much meaning as the final piece. In Stemma, I use kukui nuts and red thread to address the complexities involved in defining identity through bloodlines, geography, or cultural tradition and location. Wrapped kukui nuts, the repetitive meditative act of wrapping thread, and the resulting accumulated forms, provide imagery for shifting relations to family. The kukui nuts are no longer visually accessible but they support each form from the inside and in doing so, define their final appearance to an extent.

Born in Lansing, Michigan, Wendy Kawabata lives in Honolulu, Hawai`i where she is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. Wendy is an interdisciplinary thinker and maker, as her work moves through painting, drawing and installation. She received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of New Mexico. Her work examines the spaces of, and between, maternity, domesticity, and family identity. Her current research looks at her relationship to Hawai`i through family ties and the inherent difficulties of defining identity in a racially and culturally mixed family. She has shown her work across the United States, as well as in Ireland and Australia.

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Sabrina Lee

There are written and unwritten rules as guidelines for how a society and the individuals within it should behave. Laws are formulated to ensure the individuals will perform as society wishes: “The orderly Pattern allows us to make predictions about the way things will behave and act (Jennifer Michael Hecht).” Socialization, the individual versus the collective, identity, transformation, and responsibility for behavior are ideas which work together to form social expectation and a specific perception. My work addresses these expectations and perceptions by way of lived experience. As a second generation immigrant, I lie in a state of no man’s land, fluctuating between opposing social definitions, the Eastern ideal of the collective versus the Western ideal of the individual. These social currents move and carry stereotypes resulting in disharmony. I am left wondering how this transforms identity, culture, unity, interdependency, and globalization. 

Sabrina Lee was born in Merced, California to Chinese immigrants who owner-operated a Chinese restaurant. From an early age, she was encouraged to seek and be interested in people of different cultures. She earned a BA in Interior Design from San Diego State University in 2001 in San Diego, California. She has lived in Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, Sweden, and San Francisco. She currently resides outside Detroit, Michigan while working towards completing her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in spring of 2007. Her travels include China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Canada, Mexico, and extensively throughout the United States, and Western and Eastern Europe.

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Suzanne Long

As an artist working an dliving in this time of social and cultural redefinement I think it is important to address the issues of the day through art as social commentary.

The "bulldyke"  and the "queen" series are narratives about the shifting currents of language, the potential of once prejudicial terms to evolve into an idiom that can be embraced. These pieces walk a thin line between humor and melancholy, the terms "bulldyke" and "queen" still sting but the series, stripped of malice confronts a slur with humor.  

 bull•dyke  'bool,dik   (also bull•dike or bull•dyk•er) noun informal offensive

a particularly masculine lesbian.

queen  kwen   noun 

6 informal offensive a male homosexual, typically one regarded as ostentatiously effeminate. 

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Candace Nicol

My work suggests that I am acting as a visual interrogator. I photograph the mundane, the everyday, and through printmaking and collage, I re-interpret those images by juxtaposing them with bits of visual culture taken from the internet. The result hints at disruptions in the social norm, especially bringing attention to gendered exchanges.

In some works, I begin to take a closer look at the sexual contradictions in our culture. For instance, in the piece, Dull, I voyeuristically capture a man's anus, along with a pair of scissors in the background. The viewer is placed into a precarious position, wondering if this is a scene from Lorraina Bobbit's diary, asking: Does every woman wish this upon her man? Perhaps: Maybe once, twice or three times, as evidenced with the cascading red paper hearts in the foreground. These red hearts, symbolic of love... So, what is now being told? Is this an image of transformation?

I am working under the assumption that our relationships are plagued by sexual identities and constructs that begin to undermine our basic need for intimacy and love. When our relationships are defined by our sexual practices, we begin to fear our feelings and emotions. Overall, it is my hope that as I begin to expose the monster in the mundane, I can uncover the secrets that impede and alienate use from ourselves and each other.

Candace Nicol is an artist and printmaking instructor at Truckee Meadows Community College, Reno, NV. Candace received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Boise State University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is part of permanent collections including Boise Art Museum, Corcoran College of Art and Design, Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper at Rutgers University, Southern Graphics Council Archives, University of Sharjah in Dubai, U.A.E., and Orfali Gallery in Amman, Jordan. She recently was awarded the Sierra Arts Visual Artist Grant for 2005-06. Her current work includes multi-layered etchings and aquatints that address societal issues of relationships and sexual identities.

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Mel Northum

I've been thinking lately about dualities in my life and comments that friends have made on the ease with which they believe I move between seemingly disparate concepts, such as male and female. But I don't think of it as moving or choosing between the two as much as accepting myself as both. In my ponderings I realized that this fluidity also exists palpably in my studio. Some artists say that they "loose" sense of time and even self while working. I comprehend their meaning yet disagree with the sentiment of loosing anything. Instead, I gain time and understand self which I believe is by, again, fusing two seeminly disparate ideas, that of working in a disciplined, knowledgeable way and that of responding intuitively to a situation. Neither discipline nor intuition is lost, they remain unique; but in a consilience, a "jumping together," they flux and flow until I am not certain when one of the other is being employed in this vibrant experience. My best explanatory analogy makes use of the adage "two sides of the same coin." Heads discipline, tails intuition (purely randome alises). When this coin is placed on edge and flicked to spin upright, heads and tails blur. You know that they are there, but these flat whirling forms merge into something entirely new... a momentary sphere, or in my studio, a sculpture.

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Jocelyn Shu

The act of crossing between cultures has been a significant part of my life that I have encountered through my travels and on a daily basis as an individual of mixed cultural backgrounds. It is an action that requires constant re-examination of oneself and one's environment. This experience is a heavy influence on my concerns toward painting in which I likewise see as an action that requires simultaneous reflection on the personal self as well as the context that one is practicing in. I consider the painting, and particularly the stretched canvas with its Western-based history, as a space with specific cultural parameters. In my work, painting is an action that serves a dual purpose of addressing this context as well as creating a visual connection between the artist, medium, and viewer.

Through the juxtaposition of the subject matter with the physical materials of the painting, I am interested in questioning whether the cultural or otherwise physical framework that one is "built" from determines one's identity. The subjects in my paintings are devoid of a projected identity while existing within the contextual parameters of the painting, which is seen as an inherent identity for the otherwise unrecognizable subjects. The raw canvas is exposed in my recent work to emphasize the physical presence of the canvas upon which actions are often performed such as cutting, sewing, and adhering. These actions serve to dismember, heal, scar, and augment the canvas. The resulting physical and visual elements of these actions interact with paint and images of illusion to explore issues that are specific to each piece. In contrast to the questioning of identity that underlies my work, I am interested in exploring topics within individual paintings that pertain to human relationships with themselves and each other, with the physical world and with the metaphysical realm.

Jocelyn Shu currently lives in the Bay Area from which she is a native of. She received a B.F.A. degree in Painting/Drawing in 2005 through a joint-degree program with the University of San Francisco and the California College of the Arts. She spent a year studying at Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy. Her work is highly influenced from her experiences living abroad and her travels have included extensive portions of Europe and Taiwan.

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Corkey Sinks

The process of socialization teaches us the language of our culture as well as the roles we are expected to play.  The individual is constantly socialized, constantly molded to adapt in multiple environments while limited by verbal language. Dealing with patterns literally and conceptually, I find beauty in the rhythm of repetition, in the way everything fits so nicely together, and also a disturbing monotony and controlling rigidity.  The perpetual cycles in technology, the media, and real-estate, socialize the individual to maintain an economy dependent on domestic politics and binary paradigms, forcing the cycles to repeat themselves. 

Because I focus on the individual within society, I find it appropriate to use myself as my subject, to depict my own image, although made blank and ambiguous, within the sea of patterns. The materials I use are considered feminine and domestic: fabric, needle, and thread. These media link me to roles associated with my gender and allow me to examine personal and social issues related to establishing a conscious identity while also forcing me to spend a lot of time with my work.  I am obsessed with the intricacies and patterns in speech that I adopt to articulate my identity in specific environments as well as the internal conversations that happen between my role-playing selves, and my art making process pushes me to have those conversations. 

My collaborative work with Jay Medrano and James Oswald focuses on the interactions of individuals being torn by conventional and glamorized concepts of ideal relationships.  The video deconstructs facets of contemporary media saturation, what we see as “surface” spaces or spaces that lack depth, including concepts of the nuclear family and the celebrity couple, ultimately guiding our pair to a “transspace” void of normative expectations. 

Corkey Sinks was born and raised in Dallas, TX.  She attended the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands, California where she studied studio art and film and received a B.A. titled “Media Studies: Art, Film, and the Politics of Images.” Returning to the Lone Star state, she currently resides in Austin, TX where she works at the artist-run gallery, Okay Mountain. Sinks works with in variety of media ranging from craft and textiles to video focusing primarily on concepts of development of social identity and verbal language.

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