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Indepth Arts News:
"Hello Kitty Gets a Mouth, a one person exhibition by Jaime Scholnick"
2004-09-03 until 2004-09-25
Gallery Kobo Chika
Toyko, ,
JP Japan
Gallery Kobo Chika is pleased to announce the exhibition Hello Kitty Gets a
Mouth by Jaime Scholnick. This is her second solo exhibition at Gallery Kobo
Chika. The installation will include a screening of the film, works on paper
and sculptural work. An interactive performance "Shoot A Mouth on Hello
Kitty" is planned for the opening night only. After years of silence, Hello Kitty now joins the historic list of others of
the same gender in acquiring a voice. The short film depicts the frustration
Hello Kitty encounters upon realizing her inability to utter a sound.
Appropriately frustrated by her discovery, Hello Kitty promptly takes action
and finds herself in the perfect place for reconstructive surgery, Los
Angeles.
Upon encountering Japanese culture, Scholnick found Hello Kitty to perfectly
exemplify her frustrations as a woman while teaching English in the city of
Yamagata. Shocked by her older female students proudly displaying the mute
kitty on anything and everything imaginable, Scholnick began to explore the
Japanese word for cute, kawaii. The incessant striving by her women students
to eternally remain cute along with the rampant display of a figure with no
means of conveying struck Scholnick as frightening.
Exploring the similar sounding Japanese words kawaii and kowai (cute and
frightened), Scholnick finds the duality of the similar sounding words to
express the frightening void accompanying a silent female. In order to
counteract the void, her mural-sized drawings at POST arm Hello Kitty with
assault weapons to instill an expression of power to be feared.
In the past Scholnick has used Hello Kitty merchandise, marketing giveaways
such as tissue packs, coat hangers and other reinterpreted mass produced
items to find beauty in the everyday, and to talk about how we are living
now. Unfortunately, expression does not come as easily to all women as she
would wish. For Scholnick, the inundation of Hello Kitty merchandise in both
Japan and the U.S. references a global culture where women remain at risk.
More info at: http://www.hellokittygetsamouth.com/
Related Links:
Quick Arts
Access:
Tokyo (92)
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