LIMBSHIFT from April 20th to May, 19th 2023 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Isabella Chilcoat
Beauty exists in every age of human history. Classically, “beauty consists of an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole, according to proportion, harmony, symmetry, and similar notions” (Sartwell, 2022). By this metric, where there is harmony, a divine order, or a mathematical formula for aesthetic proportion, there is beauty. In every monumental human transition, humanity follows or creates beauty. Philosophy fails to provide a concrete answer that encapsulates the entirety of what beauty is, though. Therefore, beauty is a fluid thing, neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective. But when a new order appears, what is beauty, what becomes beautiful?
The Stamp Gallery’s exhibition, LIMBSHIFT, is not only contemplative on beauty, it is challenging.
LIMBSHIFT features two second-year University of Maryland MFA candidates’ mixed media, multi-dimensional artworks that highlight the capacities of the human body and its limitations. One of the artists, Dan Ortiz Leizman, grafts emerging AI technology to tactile mixed media. Through their art, they hypothesize the possibilities of human asexual reproduction in the aftermath of nuclear destruction. Ortiz Leizman’s projections obliterate the present framework for gender, sex, and social identities, leaving open the space for considering beauty in an alternative landscape. In this hypothetical, asexual reproduction carries specific Darwinian hopes for eliminating some genetic diseases, altering public health, and mitigating gender discrimination (Jose de Carli, 2017). But while asexual reproduction eliminates a significant physical divide between people, it erodes individuality by limiting the gene pool in future generations.
Imagine that there is no longer male or female, only human. There is no more variation in appearance as there is no more variation in ability. There is a new sense of sameness in reproductive ability which extinguishes distinctions in physical appearance.
There is a new order to physiology, a new formula for evolution. Traditional sexual reproduction becoming obsolete means stripping “being sexualized” from the standard of beauty because there is no need for it. This dawn of asexual reproduction calls for a reconsideration of beauty from how it looks to how it feels, how it sounds, how it operates. How is it recognized? Moving away from the physical body and from reproduction, beauty can exist on an abstracted plane unencumbered by corrupt standards or social doctrine. Beauty detached from sexualization, objectification, and gender is open and free to shift into a new meaning.
Beauty detached from sexualization, objectification, and gender is open and free to shift into a new meaning.
Gabriel Jose de Carli, Tiago Campos Pereira, On human Parthenogenesis, Medical Hypotheses, Volume 106, 2017, Pages 57-60, ISSN 0306-9877, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2017.07.008.
Sartwell, Crispin, “Beauty”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/beauty/.
Teach Me How to Love This World from October 19 to December 10, 2022 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Ellen Zhang
Bold red streaks, ominous ringing, whirrings of rotating projector shutters… each piece in Teach Me How to Love This World plays an integral part in illustrating a past, present, and future world grappling with violence and peace. What I like about Kei Ito’s work is that it’s direct and straightforward without undermining its complexities. As a viewer, I am amazed by how he has balanced artistic choices, abstract themes (like the meaning of peace), and the factuality of the impacts of nuclear war. Together, these three elements create the necessary experience of being caught off guard that precedes a stage of reflection.
Stepping foot into this exhibition for the very first time, the piece that caught my attention was Teach Me How to Love This World: Sacrifice. The immediate appearance of a blood-red peace sign dripping down the canvas is jarring, intimidating, and contradicting. The perception of tranquility, from the peace symbol, is intruded by the blood-red color, enhancing Ito’s message that peace doesn’t come without fatal sacrifice. Ito reflects the destructive nature of war weapons through artistic choices that don’t sugarcoat and, instead, speak volumes on how nuclear war is a source of fear and intimidation. For those that are conflict-avoidant like me, an initial glimpse is enough to instill a sense of trepidation and uneasiness.
Kei Ito, Teach Me How to Love This World: Sacrifice, 2022. Unprimed canvas, spray paint, print on aluminum dibond, 36x48x3 in.
The question of “whose peace, whose sacrifice” splattered across the top and bottom of the canvas adds to the power of the piece. It’s a transparent move that introduces perplexing questions between humanity and war, unlike the sanitized version we often get from the mainstream media. By proposing the question of “whose peace, whose sacrifice,” Ito also eases the viewer into a stage of reflection: Who are the victims of nuclear war? Who benefits from it? Is there even a clear distinction between the two or are we all unknowing victims of nuclear war? While I haven’t found the answers to these questions, I appreciate how Ito’s work is centralized in questions rather than statements. Nothing is definitive and, perhaps, this is on purpose. Ito breaks the stigma of reflecting on war by encouraging us, the viewers, to weigh on an integral theme of conflict: someone’s peace is brought through someone else’s suffering. During Ito’s artist talk, he even encouraged his audience to consider everyday life through the lens of sacrifice, war, and peace. For example, he mentioned how fast fashion is one of many suppressed examples of those benefiting from another’s exploitation.
Situated in the center of the canvas is an inverted photograph of a goat receiving a blood transfusion by three masked doctors. Here, Ito adds additional layers of identity, fact, and questioning. The presence of a goat pays homage to the significance of animals ingrained in Japanese culture. At the same time, the photograph is rooted in factual evidence that depicts the devastating effects of atomic bomb testing. The original photograph was taken by George Skadding in 1947 and captures the moment when a goat, exposed to radiation from an A-bomb test on Bikini Atoll Island, receives a blood transfusion as it lies strapped to a surgical table at the Bethesda Naval Medical Research Institute, MD. Reflecting on the photo with its historical backdrop in mind subjects the viewer to numerous questions: Why did Ito choose a historical moment that took place in Maryland? Why is the photograph placed where it is? Why is it inverted? With no answers in plain sight, we are encouraged to ponder the artistic choices Ito has made. To me, Teach Me How to Love This World: Sacrifice is a piece that embodies reflection. And quite literally, the contents on the canvas are mirrored, portraying the interdependent relationship between those who enjoy peace and those who sacrifice. At the same time, the viewers can reflect on how power and politics determine who is impacted by war. The photograph alone is a testament to how some, if not all, can have their peace stripped from them at any given moment and with no say at all.
Despite the way Ito explores the dichotomy between peace and war, his exhibition is certainly not despairing in nature. By balancing the factual and the abstract, he breaks the silence on taboo subjects and builds fruitful conversations, open to anyone regardless of their background, belief systems, and ideas. Ito brings a sense of vulnerability into the gallery, graciously inviting us to explore, and prompting reflections to remember.
Teach Me How to Love This World: Kei Ito will be on view in The Stamp Gallery at the University of Maryland, College Park from October 19 through December 10, 2022. For more information on Kei Ito and his work, visit http://www.kei-ito.com/.
Teach Me How to Love This World from October 19 to December 10, 2022 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Isabella Chilcoat
My typical approach to articulating each exhibition by the Stamp Gallery over the past year and a half has involved a level of formal artistic analysis and critique. However Teach Me How to Love This World: Kei Ito plucked a chord in my being that I feel calls for a more intimate reading. Ito’s current solo exhibition manifests not only a physical presence, but also a profound psychological phenomenon of deep empathy and contemplation. His works plunge my own mind into an abyss of chilling curiosity – they cast a red-hued light of extrospection on my own inner tribulations. Themes of generational trauma, visible and invisible wounds, violence, destruction, rebirth, and peace radiate from the six works on view, and each piece contains a piercing capacity to connect its viewer with a larger history surrounding them. Ito’s work certainly has prompted me to deepen my inward self-exploration as it connects to generational wounds that bleed into my present.
Aptly titled, Into the Abyss (2022), a unique C-Print of sunlight developed film, hangs on the Gallery’s entrance wall, a rectangular plate of aluminum dibond emblazoned with blood-red word pairings against its smooth black surface. The text couples a pronoun and a noun, pronoun + noun, pronoun + noun, pronoun + noun… endlessly in columns that eventually obscure toward the bottom. These groupings compose a solemn poetry to ponder while sojourning through and beyond the gallery walls with phrases pertaining to: “their + war,” “his + war,” “his + weapons,” “your + weapons,” “your + peace.” With a repetition that references an obsessive compulsive sequence of words, Into the Abyss forces me to recall my own journey through healing the consequences of generational trauma.
Kei Ito, Into the Abyss, 2022. Unique C-Print film mounted on aluminum dibond, laminate, 40x32x1 in.
Though different circumstances, Ito’s encapsulation of heirloom agony, or legacies of passed down emotional damages, is something that resonates in a myriad of settings yet lacks the recognition and understanding it deserves. I particularly love this print because it echoes a period in my early childhood where I would repeat a list of the same, completely arbitrary “safe” phrases in instances of high anxiety in a set numerical quantity. As a child the specific recitation of my “safe” words calmed my autonomic nervous system as an act of defense in a situation in which I felt my safety or autonomy was compromised. In retrospect of more than fifteen years (and with professionally guided coping strategies) I can still remember my “safe” phrases – no longer with a feeling of desperate relief, but a feeling of grief for a waning childhood of which I had little concept at the time and a stronger desire to console my child self and restore a sense of security. Ito’s phrases, while clearly intentionally correlated, illustrate the sequences of inner thoughts in an ordered but increasingly blurry image synonymous with memory. Memories of my “safe” words, survival mechanisms, and certain traumatic instances of my life flicker through my mind like an orderly reel of film or text until the clarity vanishes in a manner similar to the visual qualities of Into the Abyss and other works in the Stamp Gallery, including a dual Kodak slide projection piece titled Teach Me How to Love This World (2022), in which the same pronoun + noun couples project on the wall.
Kei Ito, Teach Me How to Love This World, 2022. 35mm slide, Kodak carousel projectors.
Ito’s exhibition has offered a narrative and a solidarity to trauma by employing the acute dichotomy between war and peace. His work in the gallery also translates the severity of war and of peace individually. If I relate these concepts to my own journey with mental health I can visualize how my mind and my body have at times existed at war with one another, both seeking the same peace from trauma, but disconnected. The lack of harmony enables a cascade of conflict, confusion, and fear. Being at war with the self or warring (in survival mode) against a harmful situation unfolds in a complex manner, especially if that trauma is carried through multiple generations. The devastations of war can bare themselves physically, but often, as the scars fade, the invisible wounds, emotional traumas, anxiety, trauma-induced ADHD, PTSD, and cPTSD rage more severely. The sinister aftermath of battle (both literal and metaphorical), when the dust has settled, too often leaves the survivor’s remaining injuries unrecognized, unfinished, on the inside, and sometimes resurfacing as panic attacks, racing heart rates, an urge to flee—the list goes on. There is seldom peace immediately after a trauma. Without proper time and care for wounds to heal, injuries can fester and compound. War and peace are not black and white; the space between is easier to leave hidden, but that gray space is also the only ground for true healing. The path to peace can take generations, making “peace” no easy feat. Accordingly, some of the world’s best efforts at “keeping the peace” do little more than apply palliative bandages after onslaughts of violence to cover a deadly (unsightly) injury.
Occupying the floor with ash on a panel of wood, Riddle of Peace/War (2022-ongoing) considers these layered topics by questioning who will ultimately be sacrificed for either “war” or “peace.” A misconstrued conception of the means by which to secure peace tips a violent scale for which humanity will always pay the price. Additionally, the individual handling of “war” and “peace” can also stand as a microcosm for the global struggle. Seeking peace internally can create desperation as it does within larger politics with fear and anxiety at their core. This desperation, anxiety, and fear screams, “seek peace BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.” However, speaking from the individual level, I have only been able to grasp authentic peace within myself through a place of care and unconditional love for the covered parts of myself deemed unfit to express in the open. Releasing blame, shame, and fear and growing in empathy for the parts of myself and my childhood that I was conditioned to keep hidden have been the only ways to work through the traumas in my own story and continue growing from a stronger foundation. Aptly constructing and simultaneously destroying the distinctions between “war” and “peace,” Ito’s exhibition demonstrates the necessity of considering life from multiple angles and reveals that nothing is truly black and white. Furthermore, my “path to peace” is an evolving effort, but at its center I have been learning to remove the shame in an effort to understand all parts of myself, just as Ito removes shaming from his exhibition for those who inflict violence in their efforts for “peace” recalled in his works. Even the title of the exhibition, Teach Me How to Love This World, acts as a macro glance for the core requisite of my inner healing, which could read: Teach Me How to Love Myself.
Kei Ito, Riddle of Peace/War, 2022-ongoing. Ash, wooden platform.
Though somber, Ito’s exhibition is not hopeless. On the contrary, his work is full of hope. Nothing difficult disappears by ignoring it; peace is not possible without confronting daunting realities and pushing through them with eyes and heart wide open. Ito’s work does just that. It is bearing the face of questions the world is afraid to ask, and bravely calling for healing in the gray areas. If nothing else, Teach Me How to Love This World has inspired a level of self-reflection and further affirmation of the importance of empathy and love toward myself and in confronting the world around me. Ito’s exhibition implores, “teach me how to love this world.” I suggest that a place to start is learning how to love ourselves.
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Kei Ito’s work is included in Teach Me How to Love This World at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from October 19 – December 10, 2022.
