Produced in partnership with the Powell Street Festival Society
Between what’s said and unsaid is an exhibition of drawings and works on paper by Nikkei (Japanese descent) artists from Canada, USA, and Japan. This show looks at drawing as storytelling, drawing as exploration, drawing as play and process. From the sequential storyboards of graphic novels to more elusive reverberations between ink, image and narrative, common threads appear. Linked by a loose attention to subjects of youth culture, melancholic daydreaming and the complexities of nostalgia, these works posit a subtle temporal reversal where the “negative space” of our notions of Drama and Event—the mundane, forgettable and decidedly un-dramatic epiphanies of day-to-day life—is favoured over more defined notions of causality, conflict and climax. As this exhibition suggests, the accessibility and tactile immediacy of this medium remains well-suited to experimentation and discovery. Set within the Powell Street Festival’s larger theme of Asobi (play), Between what’s said and unsaid provides an unpredictable, associative counterpoint to the regulated tick of structured time.
Cindy Mochizuki is a visual artist working in video, installation, audio, drawing, text, webworks and collaboration. Her current body of work examines history, memory and trauma by working with ideas that counter-monumentalize history and war. Her work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally.
Madoka Hara moved to Canada from Japan in 1998 after completing study in Child Education. Her self-taught drawing skill and craft-loving spirit brought her to an Interactive Media program to produce an online storybook. Her animations have been shown previously at the Powell Street Festival, and her illustrations have been published in the Vancouver Review.
Jillian Tamaki graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2003. Her illustrations have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Maclean’s, The Walrus, and many other publications around North America. In October 2006, Conundrum Press (Montreal) published a compilation of comics, published and unpublished work entitled Gilded Lilies.
R. Kikuo Johnson was born in 1981 on the island of in Maui. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, he moved to Brooklyn, New York where he currently draws comics and plays the ukulele. Some of his clients include The New Yorker, The New York Times, Premiere magazine, Nickelodeon and more.
Kaori Kasai, graduated from art school in Tokyo, lived in San Francisco, Hong Kong, Vancouver and now Numazu. She creates her own world of eccentric creatures and personalities which bloom into the void.
Curator Alia Nakashima is an animation producer and graduate of Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. She has been a board member and volunteer for Powell Street Festival for the past 13 years.