THE INTIMATE INFINITE
Tomiko Jones’ enchanting exhibition, The Intimate Infinite, provokes questions about the human relationship with the landscape. The exhibition features lens-based investigations of place, both significant outdoor expanses and intimate interior spaces. Through photographic interventions that traverse time and notions of belonging, Jones’ work journeys through landscape, chronicling passage from interior to exterior, known and unknowable. This work reflects historical modes of artmaking while imbuing a contemporary urgency and relevance.
Through an exploration of lands that have personal significance as they relate to Jones’ family heritage, as well as sites of national significance such as national parks and the U.S. / Mexico border, Jones takes an anthropological approach to her art practice. Her work is grounded in researching how humans interact with the land and each other in public and private spaces. Many of the works are self-portraits of sorts and a reflection of her contemplation of the individual’s role in the relationship between site and self.
Each of the works in the exhibition are conceptualized and realized with a great degree of artistry and a love of materials. Archival and sustainable materials of the highest quality convey the artist’s deep respect for her subject matter and imbue each work with the importance of a treasured artifact. Many different photographic processes, both traditional and contemporary techniques, are employed based on how best to represent a particular question.
With the inclusion of works that present the artist’s ancestry, both in overt and subtle ways, Jones has uncovered truths about belonging – who belongs, who decides and by what means. This plays out in Passage, a series that pays tribute to objects of the everyday that are anchored in the home, a place of safety and acceptance. These works honor the artist’s connection to her maternal grandmother and her life as a Japanese American. In the series, Excavate, Jones visits internment camps where Japanese and Japanese Americans were incarcerated during and after WWII, including some of her extended family members. The works in Excavate reveal only what can be interpreted from the distance of time. Remnants of lost cultural objects and dismantled sites are represented beneath a veil of mystery similar to the fog of memory.
The splendor and beauty of spectacular landscapes can be seen in many of the works as metaphor for an ideal that may no longer exist or may never have. The works in These Grand Places address the rapidly changing landscapes of public lands due to a Western perspective based on the idea that natural resources are there for the reaping. Here the question of belonging again underscores the basis of the work – who are public lands truly for and who can safely enjoy them? Who does this land belong to, and who decides? Further, how do we use these lands without, in Jones’ words “loving them to death”?
These questions form a starting point for an artist with a demonstrated passion for the natural world, exploring human connection, and the art of making. Through the study of materials and processes, Tomiko Jones’s work continues to evolve through the years, developing new questions, exploring a rich tapestry of media, and building upon traditional technologies to expand the contemporary expression of photo-based artwork.
Cecily Cullen, Curator, Center for Visual Art
HATSUBON
Hatsubon explores the dynamic tension between tradition and performance through photographs and objects. In the diaphanous space between life and death, the materiality of the works suggests the dualities of the fleeting and the lasting, the ephemeral and the corporeal, and the pendulous state between longing and release. The ceremony of hatsubon marks the first anniversary of a loved one’s death, held during the yearly ritual of Obon, a Japanese Buddhist custom honoring ancestors. A ritual for the deceased is the sending of a small vessel–shoryobune–to sea. I made my own version by splitting, steaming, and bending bamboo into a boat form and skinning it with waxed kōzo paper. We sewed yukata, simple cotton kimonos, and on the dawn of his hatsubon, sent the boat to sea from the shores of Hawai’i in his honor.
Just a few days before my father passed away, an unforgettable conversation with him guided me to carve Bring me the Oar and the length of his body from long ribs of steam bent ash wood in Skeleton Boat.
Hatsubon visits three geographic sites of significance: Pennsylvania, my father’s birthplace, along a river he grew up on; Hawai’i, my mother’s birthplace where we set the boat to sea, and where he is buried; California, where my parents met and I was born.