Both Sides Now
Tara Tamaribuchi
Rodrigo Valenzuela
Samantha Wall
Gallery Curator: Arielle Simmons
October 20, 2022 - January 5, 2023
In their specific articulations, Tara Tamaribuchi, Rodrigo Valenzuela, and Samantha Wall bring a broader American experience of cultural belonging to life. This young country, created through immigration, borders, and colonization, means Both Sides Nowis a story touching every family. Generation after generation, we re-negotiate who belongs and who does not. Through their art, Tamaribuchi, Valenzuela, and Wall speak to the elusive sense of identity in the immigrant experience, integral and unprescribed by a singular homeland. From unique vantage points, their evocative works create tangible realities of emotional complexities.
Tara Tamaribuchi has built a Camouflage Net, referencing the forced labor in Japanese Internment Camps on American soil during World War II. Beautiful woven kimonos replace the war-time fabric of battlefield armor, in a reclamation of culture that sheds light rather than hides. Rodrigo Valenzuela’s video Prole documents migrant workers discussing unionization. The topic, ripe for our city and moment, invokes notions of the American work ethic, questioning at what point rights are earned. Turning inwards, Samantha Wall engages both the Korean folklore and Eurocentric mythologies of her ancestors, to detangle how stories inform our behavior and what it looks like to be split among cultures.