Exhibit: A Modicum of Candor, by Jave Yoshimoto
March 6-June 20 (artist talk March 5, 7p)
CSN Fine Arts Gallery, free, csn.edu
Tragedies — shootings, fires, earthquakes, refugee crises — now occur with such conveyor-belt implacability that each one bumps a previous incident from our minds before we’ve fully brought our emotions to bear. Welcome to the new modernity, where all that is solid melts into the news cycle. Japanese-born American artist Jave Yoshimoto is doing his bit to take on this ephemerality. “I address this social amnesia through my art, with the work acting as a social memory for tragic events so quickly forgotten in our information age,” he says. But he does more than simply jog your memory. In a piece such as the laser-cut wood sculpture “What Is Your Emergency?,” yes, the image of displaced people in Aleppo reminds you of the war you’d sorta forgotten Syria is suffering; but its high-tech framing within a simulated cell phone, in particular the Ignore/Answer option, also unfurls an unambiguous moral challenge, too. How will you answer? (Not that anyone here has forgotten the tragedy, but Yoshimoto also created an image related to the October 1 massacre, below.) Scott Dickensheets
