How
I Learned To...
curatorial
statement by Kevin Chen
< back to How I Learned
To... page
This is a brand new collaborative installation by Weston Teruya
and Michele Carlson that explores and disrupts the traditional
American classroom. Increasingly recognized over the past
couple of years for their intricate works on paper including
collage, paint, and drawing, both artists have created individual
bodies of work that use the actions of reframing, reorganizing,
and restructuring existing objects and images to execute their
respective conceptual and artistic visions. A wall chart based
on Howard Zinn’s seminal book A People’s History
of the United States informs the painting on the gallery walls.
With millions of copies sold, Zinn’s social history
fleshes out the bare skeleton of traditional historical texts
with the stories of working men and women throughout America’s
history. The wall charts, designed as posters to be hung in
the classroom or at home, are organized thematically as well
as chronologically. Through full color graphics (referenced
through the lines and symbols circumnavigating the room) and
condensed text, these charts allow the reader to trace the
developments of specific topics — such as slavery and
resistance to the role of women — that go beyond the
wars and presidencies of traditional U.S. history. Yet, events
that ultimately shape history, even as told through Zinn’s
pioneering approach, aren’t as neat and linear when
it unfolds. Sometimes it is messy and undirected, intersecting
with a myriad of other factors, including class concerns,
cultural conventions, and social norms. Teruya and Carlson
remind us that history as taught through books and in the
classroom isn’t always how it is pictured. They also
imagine a much more practical history that can exist within
the classroom — one that is passed on from year to year,
peer to peer. Hidden within and behind the architecture of
desks and bookcases is a collective repository of learned
experience and shared knowledge. Notes such as “Hate
will eat you” and “Read every day, if you read
20 minutes a day you’ll read over one million words
a year” and “Don’t get pregnant at an early
age” are intended to provide real and functional educational
information that can help those in the classroom get through
school and become the best individuals they can be. Simultaneously
playful and insightful, Teruya and Carlson's installation
invites us to remember how we ourselves learned the things
that we now know, and to consider the different levels and
types of education that we did or did not receive in school.
In
his previous and current work, Teruya has explored spaces
of privilege and control and the objects that live at these
bordered spaces, such as barricades, chain link fences, grass
lawns, everyday commonplace chairs, flagpoles. Carlson has
worked with intensely charged historical and contemporary
cultural symbols and artifacts, such as fabric patterns, pit
bulls, and transportation devices, to remove and resituate
them from their familiar context in order to create a space
where new stories and memories can be constructed. They both
have used and referenced objects that still carry with them
traces of their original social and cultural purpose (such
as the protective barricade or the maligned pit bull), but
have been transformed into more ambiguous and undefined arrangements,
allowing for the possibility of intervention and change through
the imagination.
Although
both have worked in media outside of drawing and painting,
this is both Teruya and Carlson’s first full-scale installation
project. The established worlds they have created on paper
become manifested into a room-size installation, transforming
our gallery into a prototypical Californian classroom, yet
one constructed with their identifiable artistic and conceptual
approaches of reframing, reorganizing, and restructuring existing
objects and images. By disrupting and re-imagining the environment
that we learn and grow up in, Teruya and Carlson explore how
we form our notions of nationhood and identity and how histories
of marginalized communities are taught and absorbed into these
ideas of nationhood and citizenship.
<
back to How I Learned To... page
