Yumi Janairo Roth explores ideas of immigration, hybridity, & displacement through installations & objects, collaborations & solo projects. For example, she’s built shipping pallets & dollies, modified them with culturally specific patterns & reintroduced them to various sites. She’s re-imagined how maps might function in here & abroad & what those maps might tell us about both users & producers. She’s made chainlink fence from silver & introduced it to vacant lots filled with construction debris. Intensive labor is necessary to produce these projects yet these aspects are not made immediately apparent to the casual viewer. By suppressing these normally foregrounded attributes, & by extension the trappings of conventional “beauty,” the viewer is forced to reconcile disparate visual languages found in the same object. In all of these projects her works function as both natives & interlopers to their environments, simultaneously recognizable & unfamiliar to their users.
keywords
sculpture, temporary, site-based installations and site-based projects, photography, material culture and anthrolopogy as they intersect with contemporary art, ideas around immigration, diaspora, and hybridity
