Dona Nabata highlights Japanese-Canadian history at VisualSpace Gallery, July 18 to 25
The local artist’s new exhibition is based on a collection of photographs of Japanese Canadians taken in the years before the Second World War
From The Picnic by Dona Nabata.
VisualSpace Gallery presents Dona Nabata: The Picnic from July 18 to 25
THE INTERNMENT OF more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians in British Columbia during the Second World War is one of the most shameful chapters of local history. Dona Nabata’s family was directly impacted by the internment, a fact that has informed much of the Vancouver-based artist’s work.
Dona Nabata
The pieces that make up The Picnic, Nabata’s new exhibition at VisualSpace Gallery, are based on historical pre-war photographs of Japanese Canadians, which the Emily Carr grad has printed on canvas, painted, and altered.
The photos are drawn from the personal collection of a Japanese Canadian woman, and they escaped confiscation or burning only because she was out of the country during the war.
In an artist statement, Nabata explains why she chose the specific photos that formed the basis of her transformative pieces:
“They showed Japanese Canadians at leisure, being unselfconscious and not being ethnicized, exoticized or othered. This racialized leisure creates new possibilities for Japanese Canadians to see themselves in art. While the photos have a joyous quality—a community taking pictures of itself, for itself—they also have a foreboding quality, lying in wait for circumstances that will break their peaceful existence.”
In these paintings, Nabata, who began her artistic practice working primarily in clay, references the Japanese pottery tradition of kintsugi (repairing broken pottery using lacquer dusted with powdered gold).
“By piecing them together again, something more beautiful is created,” she writes. “These paintings enable Japanese Canadians to heal, culturally and emotionally. It is important for me to show Japanese Canadians at leisure in the distant past and bring them into contemporary life. It raises questions of who is entitled to leisure? What if we had been able to psychologically continue from this place in history, until now?” 
From The Picnic by Dona Nabata.
Related Articles
