IN COLLABORATION WITH SHUICHI MURAKAMI

In 1997, I married a Japanese Native. This life change initiated an opportunity to exam our marital identity existing between two cultures – Japanese and American. We are led by this experience randomly as it progresses through various stages of displacement, awareness, interpretation, affirmation, ultimately manifesting itself firmly in our art works.

Unique life experiences are formed by social, political, economical, and religious backgrounds that cultures have inherited from forefathers.  Social norms teach that race, culture, gender (et.) is a borderline. The attempt of this work is to build a platform to document, share, compare and interpret our multicultural experience.

My personal research for this project is grounded in the investigation of public and personal histories and internal dialogues as they relate to the shaping of human experience. I appropriate story telling, memoirs and artifacts collected from personal archives re-contextualizing them into a new framework of narrative parallels. This work is about carving our place in the history of the family of man. It is a collaborative work between two artists.