The Intersection of Art, Labor, and Imagination
Initiated and organized by The Bridge Arts Foundation, the 'Beyond Borders' Global Young Artist Open-Call Exhibition is currently being held at The Scholart Selection Art Space in San Gabriel, California, and will run until December 31, 2023.
Bridge Arts Foundation's Art Director, Tia Xu, engaged in a conversation about the exhibition and art with several artists participating in this exhibition. In this interview, we have the pleasure of speaking with artist Amy Yoshitsu.
—— Q&A ——
Tia Xu: Could you please share your background and what inspired you to pursue a career in art?
Amy Yoshitsu: I was raised by Chinese-American and Japanese-American artist parents in Berkeley, CA. My upbringing was interwoven with the psychological, economic, and social challenges of being an Asian-American artist within twentieth-century US assimilation and white supremacy. Given the difficulties they faced, I had no intention of becoming an artist. That changed when I found, and began to refine, my artistic perspective at Harvard University upon meeting the artist and professor Annette Lemieux. I still have documentation of the first sculpture I made freshman year in her class and, upon recent reflection, the themes and message do not stray far from my current work and interests. Through image-making and sculpture, I forged a home for my multi-layered attempts to understand my conditions, my relationships, and those of others through the systems we are born into and instantiate daily. For me, pursuing a life and career of creativity has societal, capitalist, and interpersonal challenges but when I am aligned with my core needs and voice, I know it is what I want to do with the time I am privileged to have.
We Made It (San Bernardion County, CA), photo courtesy of artist.
Tia: What does "Beyond Borders" mean to you, and how does your work in this exhibition either reflect or challenge this concept?
Amy: The phrase “Beyond Borders” signals any attempt to act, think, and imagine broader than enforced and internalized limitations. Obviously “borders” strongly imply the violently created and prescribed confines defining nation-states, owned land, and private property. My work seeks to engage with the mechanisms that maintain and grow the power of borders be they physical, economic, social, etc. in order to understand how we are intimately affected by them and, ultimately, how we can break out of them.
Return and Schedule Self-Interest focuses on the systems managed by the US IRS, which is built from demographically biased justifications and assumptions that impact everyone. Tax forms are embedded with formulas defining and assigning monetary advantages and penalties to subsets of caregiving relationships, types of labor, and characteristics of people, and, thus, maintain and accelerate long-standing hierarchies. Through textiles and scale, the work speaks to the emotional, and often traumatic impact, that this notoriously boring and onerous, yet potent and ever-present, apparatus has on us individually and collectively.
Tia: Can you tell us the story behind a specific artwork from the exhibition?
Amy: I started working on Return and Schedule Self-Interest in 2021. Inspired by how taxes affect my personal relationships and by Dorothy Brown’s The Whiteness of Wealth, I hand and machine-sewed textiles based on IRS Form 1040. Each page is scaled to human size; the height is 62”, my height. In February 2023, I created 8 more panels, Schedules B, C, D, E, and SE, which each represent components of our financialized capitalist society that play an increasingly large role in inequity: private property, the freelance/gig system (on which artists are often dependent), and small business owners. In learning about the history of the US tax system, becoming informed by the work of Dorothy Brown, and doing my own taxes yearly, I think often about how my own choices, privileges and challenges are represented in the economic and social surveillance and prescriptions of each line entry on a form.
Return and Schedule Self Interest, 2023, Linen, canvas, thread, chain, Dimensions variable, photo courtesy of artist.
Tia: How do you view the role of art in promoting cultural understanding and bridging divides, as emphasized in the exhibition's theme?
Amy: Art and creativity promote and engage with the nuance, specificity, and complexity that is the reality of being human. The creation of a visual, auditory, written, etc., work can be produced from creators’ very strong intent or driven by unconscious, intuitive and emotional forces (or somewhere on the spectrum between those poles). When audiences engage with work, multitudes of subtle and maybe conflicting feelings, perspectives and memories–often not at the daily psychological fore due to the heaps of focus and energy on our hyperspeed capitalist pace–can be generated, or just seep out. The cycle of artistic creation and engagement, and the processes within each, are some of the few spaces that allow and foster contradictions, dirtiness/messiness, the state of being unfinished. The ability for art to house broad, deep and entangled practices, ideas, and approaches is what makes it a force for bridging the entrenched, the binary, the certain.
Return and Schedule Self-Interest is my first creation that explores my deep interest in how the US tax system perpetuates and is built from inequity. For example, thanks to Dorothy Brown, I often think about the history of tax benefits through marriage, which were derived from white privilege and audacity, and the inseparability of race, class, gender and sexuality. I will attempt to quickly summarize a historical story I learned through her book and encourage everyone to read The Whiteness of Wealth.
In 1927, a wealthy heterosexual white couple, in which solely the husband generated monetary revenue, defied the income tax rules and stated each individual’s income as fifty percent of what the husband made. The result of this allocation meant they paid significantly less overall income tax. They took this to the Supreme Court and won. In addition to a process that underscores the power of wealth and whiteness in our legal and economic systems, the benefits they received were dependent on white heteropatriarchal social norms and ideals. At that time, of course, the man-made significantly more or all of the income within couples of this type. However, for Black couples (as these are exemplified in Dorothy Brown’s book), it was most commonly the case that both individuals made about the same income and this meant they did not receive the same tax benefits. From my knowledge of my own lineage, other hetero couples of color were in this same income parity boat. Sadly, of course, this story further highlights how only those of specific race, gender, sexuality, and personal choices were even allowed to be part of a significantly impactful legal and economic mechanism.
Amy Yoshitsu, photo courtesy of Alexis Rivierre.
Tia: What materials and techniques do you prefer to use in your art, and could you explain your choices?
Amy: Fiber, textiles and sewing are core to my work and upbringing. I embed these practices into almost every sculpture as they honor my lineage and what I was intentionally taught by my mother and by my grandmother, who was a seamstress after leaving the Japanese Internment in WWII. I deeply value sewing and welding as methods that facilitate amalgamating objects without requiring an in-between layer such as glue; two or more separate pieces of fabric, metal, etc. are now one unit without the need for a third material that may separate them and may not contribute conceptually. In my work, I combine sewing and textiles to emphasize shape, imagery, scale and texture. I build three-dimensional sculptures from paper photographs by purely employing sewing. In Return and Schedule Self-Interest, I used sewing as drawing and created a textile installation based on letter-sized paper tax forms.
Hedges-and-ledgers, photo courtesy of AmaYah Harrison.
Tia: Is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience?
Amy: The social component of my practice is grounded in co-building Converge Collaborative, a BIPOC workers cooperative and arts collective. We offer creative multimedia services to companies and organizations of all kinds and we are engaged in our own collaborative creative projects that manifest as podcasts, workshops, and more. As artists and workers our practice centers on collaboration, solidarity, and equity. We weave together our expressive talents with our labor expertise and lived experiences to provide our partners with project support informed by the belief that work and labor are sites of creativity, learning and imagination.
Converge Collaborative is committed to helping create and usher in labor structures grounded in the cultural knowledge systems of people of the global majority. The collaborative co-op structure we are building offers a model for ways of working, creating, and living informed by our ancestors’ histories and cultures of collectivity, which colonization has tried to destroy. This ancestral framework bolsters our vision of radical apprenticeship which holds that work and labor are sites of creativity, learning, and imagination to be nurtured in loving support. We see our co-op as part of the web of solidarity economies created by bodies of culture who are often harmed by our current social, financial, and economic systems. To learn more about us, go to convergecollaborative.com and follow us @convergecollaborative on Instagram and LinkedIn.
I want to mention my appreciation to my co-creators for their commitment and mutual support. I especially want to thank fellow worker-owner Michelle McCrary for always leading our collective self-expression through words and visuals.
ABOUT OPEN CALL EXHIBITION PROGRAM
Bridge Arts Foundation's "Beyond Borders" Open Call Exhibition Installation View, Photo: © The Scholart Selection / Luna Hao
Bridge Arts Foundation's Open Call Exhibition Program is designed to provide support for early-career artists. For its inaugural edition, the "Beyond Borders" Open Call Exhibition has thoughtfully selected 18 talented artists from a pool of approximately 60 submissions, employing a selection process that involves art professionals. "Beyond Borders" opens from October 14th to December 31st, 2023.
ABOUT ARTIST
Amy Yoshitsu
Amy Yoshitsu (b. 1988), she/they, is a sculptor, designer, and socially engaged artist living and working in her hometown, Berkeley, CA. Yoshitsu’s work has been shown across the US and internationally. Their recent solo exhibition, “Amy Yoshitsu: Hedges and Ledgers”, was on view at Satchel Projects (Chelsea, NYC) from February-March 2023. Yoshitsu’s work has been included in group shows at Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), Pyramid Atlantic Art Center (Hyattsville, MD), Herter Gallery (UMass Amherst), and Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (Brooklyn, NY). In 2010, Yoshitsu received an A.B. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University and then attended the MFA Art program at California Institute of the Arts. Yoshitsu has been in residency at the Vermont Studio Center, the Artist Residency Project at the School of Visual Arts, Esalen Institute, and Kala Art Institute. Yoshitsu is a co-creator of Converge Collaborative, a BIPOC workers co-op and artist collective offering creative multimedia services.