千代 CHIYO: A THOUSAND GENERATIONS
Independent Research + Development Residency at CVAG Next Door with:
Principal Artist: Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa
Collaborating Artist: SD Holman
ARTIST STATEMENT
Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa grew up with two stories about her Iwaasa family.
Story #1: The family is lucky. When Imperial Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, her father (then 23) said: They’re going to lock all of us up. His Nikkei neighbours in Cumberland and Royston told him, You’re crazy, This is Canada, That could never happen here. Nevertheless her family packed up everything they could carry and smuggled themselves onto the train the night the curfew came down, seeking refuge in southern Alberta. They escaped the internment camps — the family is lucky.
Story #2: The family is unlucky. Her Obaasan (Grandmother) was schizophrenic, and lived in Essondale Mental Hospital. Her Aunt Chiyo inherited Obaasan’s schizophrenia and took her own life at age 20 by drinking lye. Tragic that the women of her family are fragile in this way — the family is unlucky.
As an adult, Iwaasa is reconsidering these two stories, lucky and unlucky, and questioning whether Chiyo’s suicide, weeks after the family fled incarceration and days before the Comox Valley’s Nikkei residents were expelled from their homes, was truly hereditary inevitability. Two stories are merging into one.
In this project named for her late aunt, Rachel Iwaasa collaborates with lens-based artist SD Holman and composer Leslie Uyeda to map the terrain between postmemory, intergenerational trauma and haunting. Iwaasa is writing the words that Uyeda will ultimately set to music, while Holman is creating original artworks that weave together art’s new photographs with archival images and documents from the Iwaasa family albums, the Cumberland Museum and Archives, and the Landscapes of Injustice digital research database. Together, they will create a transdisciplinary performance work melding spoken word, music, and images, that Iwaasa, trained as a concert pianist, will perform at the piano.
Iwaasa and Holman spent the two weeks of their CVAG Next Door Residency doing embodied research and photographing in Cumberland’s former #1 J-town and Royston Mill sites where Iwaasa’s family lived prior to their displacement, and recording an oral history from Iwaasa’s 95-year-old uncle Ray Iwaasa, a consulting Elder. Holman described it as “searching for the spirits/ghosts — a presence of Place… combing old images/writing with the places we were researching and thought might be the ‘right spot,’ when the historical traces were almost (and in some cases totally) erased… following Kiyo through her searching/yearning, and being there/witnessing. Feeling (looking?) for an invocation/honouring of… who had been there and the hauntings of what is there now. Those memories in Place and just sitting with that.” Iwaasa added “It has been invaluable to have this sustained time in the Valley. I have no words for how meaningful it has been for me to get to know the places I grew up hearing about from my father’s stories. Thanks to CVAG and to the community for welcoming me here in a way my ancestors never were.”
Holman and Iwaasa’s CVAG Next Door residency was timed to coincide with the annual Japanese Buddhist Obon holiday, when the ancestors’ spirits are believed to return and visit the living. Iwaasa and Holman presented work in progress in Cumberland to the 2024 Vancouver Island Obon Tour, organized by Steveston Buddhist Temple.
千代 Chiyo: A Thousand Generations is supported by the Japanese Canadian Legacies Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, and is part of the Past Wrongs, Future Choices project, an international partnership of scholars, artists and Japanese Diaspora community organizations telling the history of the innocent Nikkei civilians who in allied countries across the globe were spuriously associated with a foreign threat, placed on government registries, rounded up, incarcerated, dispossessed and deported. Chiyo has been presented as work in progress at the National Gallery of Canada, will show at the Banff Centre in November and will be part of the Past Wrongs Future Choices touring exhibition.
IMAGES: Courtesy of SD Holman.
RACHEL KIYO AWAASA | ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Hailed in the press as a “keyboard virtuoso and avant-garde muse” (Georgia Straight) with the “emotional intensity” to take a piece “from notes on a page to a stunning work of art” (Victoria Times Colonist), Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa is recognized among Canada’s foremost contemporary music pianists. Selected to close the ISCM World New Music Days 2017 in Vancouver, Rachel has performed in the Netherlands, Germany, US and across Canada, with engagements including Muziekweek Gaudeamus, Music TORONTO, Music on Main, Vancouver New Music, Redshift, Western Front, Vancouver Symphony, Victoria Symphony, the Aventa Ensemble (Victoria), CONTACT contemporary music (Toronto), New Works Calgary, Groundswell New Music (Winnipeg), and Vancouver Pro Musica.
IMAGES: Artists Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa and SD Holman with CVAG curator Denise Lawson.
SD HOLMAN | ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
SD Holman (born Hollywood CA circa the 60’s, presently working in Canada) is a critically acclaimed racialized dyslexic artist practicing lens-based art, installation, performance, curation, and other provocations.
SD Holman augurs the symbiocene through portraiture of human and non-human persons. Defining as a participant observer employing subjective conceptual documentary and environmental intersections, Holman’s work is conflicted and perverse, dealing in paradox and cognitive dissonance. SD deploys Indeterminacy to open artistic practice to the random and radically break from tradition, convention, and habit, to wake up to the very life we’re living, and to heal and transform our world: Tikkun Olam.
IMAGE: 千代 Chiyo: A thousand generations, courtesy of SD Holman.