Kumi Yamashita

March 30 – April 5, 2002

KUMI YAMASHITA came to the United States in 1984 as an exchange student in Indiana, where she was the only non-Caucasian in her school. The treatment she endured as an adolescent from fellow students initiated her into the forced and arbitrary limitations of racial stereotype and sparked her awareness of issues of identity. As an artist Yamashita explores these issues in works in two and three dimensions in which the image is created by unexpected means: from life portraits drawn from “credit-card” rubbings to figures rendered as shadows of objects that seem to have no obvious relationship to the result. The gap between the means and the ends evokes the poetic resonance that characterizes her “shadow” world.