What can connection look like in a world where we increasingly translate ourselves into the universe through digital languages?
In digital technology, when information is mistranslated or lost it can appear as a glitch. As our bodies move across the world, cultural or oral history becomes lost, missing, or even stolen. Gender bends, amidst the chasm of displaced earth turning industrial manufacturing into the age of information. In the wake of this we meditate on a new reality annexed from context - as mystical as a glitch in real life. The artists in Forward Echo turn to visual storytelling to construct new realities that speak to our hyperfaceted existences, creating a new language that bridges incongruent worlds.
Through painting & performance, digital image & recycled sculpture, the artists explore different visual forms to communicate that which is unspoken, untranslatable, or perhaps not yet been said through words, sight or sound. Conveyed through multimedia explorations, the artists begin a conversation about the evershifting modes of connection, identity, and existence — here, digitally, and beyond the ether.
Artists
Anh Bui
Tina Kashiwagi
Diana Li
Mariela Montero
Manny Robertson
Jeffrey Yip
Curated by Lisa Pradhan
Anh Bui (1993) is a San Francisco-based visual artist and curator. Born in Hanoi, Vietnam, and traveling to the United States at the age of 10, Anh uses art to confront his transcultural experiences, and place these experiences within a wider sociopolitical and cultural context. The resulting bodies of work investigate and subvert dominant narratives concerning nationhood, race, the immigrant experience, and gender.
Tina Michiko Kashiwagi (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through multimedia art and performance, Tina utilizes story telling to look into the past and uncover the future. Their art practice focuses on the complexities of identity and the struggles of embracing ancestral roots within the growing age of technology. Tina received their BFA in Art Education at San Francisco State University. She is a 1st year MFA candidate at Stanford University.
Diana Li is an artist and arts organizer. As an artist, she works with video, performance and installation, experimenting with technology to channel intergenerational transmissions of memory and knowledge from the ether-nets of her mixed diasporic background. She received her undergraduate degree in Visual Arts Media and Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego and her MFA at San Francisco Art Institute.
Mariela Montero (b. 1988, Honolulu, HI) is a San Francisco-based artist whose experiences as a Filipinx American womxn inform her practice, which is rooted in diaspora studies, post-colonial theory, and motherhood. She works in mixed media painting, sculpture, and installation. Mariela earned her MFA degree at the San Francisco Art Institute and has worked with organizations such as the Asian American Women Artists Association and Kearny Street Workshop.
Manny Robertson was born in the small city of Brownsville, OR, and raised amongst the rural hills of upstate New York. After receiving their bachelors of science in Art, from the State University of New York (New Paltz), the moved west to San Francisco to pursue a Masters degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. Using the aesthetics of Science-Fiction, they explore intersections of identities, technologies, and mysticism through multiple mediums. Currently residing in Los Angeles, CA working as a barista to pay the bills, and a creature-creator, monster-maker to pay the soul.
Jeffrey Yip is an interdisciplinary artist of color based out of Oakland (Lisjan Ohlone Territory) producing installation and performances with an emphasis on using technological tools. Interested in uniting the senses as an approach to building experiences, he often combines light and sound in physical and virtual spaces. Thematically his work revolves around exploring technology imagined as a means to facilitate healing and radical justice and often works collaboratively to create sustainable communities. In 2015, Jeffrey co-founded Macro Waves, a creative studio composed of designers and artists of color who specialize in producing immersive experience through conceptual art, new media and design. He is the technical director, leading and overseeing all technical aspects of their projects.
Lisa Pradhan is a multimedia artist and organizer based in Oakland, CA. Lisa explores autoethnographic gestures rooted in the Nepalese – American Diaspora through media such as site specific performance, video, installation, writing, and soundscapes. Lisa’s shown at the Asian Art Museum, the Pacific Heritage Museum, and AS Gallery and co-curated the Performing Arts showcase for Kearny Street Workshop’s APAture 2017: Unravel.
Photos courtesy of Erin Alejo.