Ken Okiishi
A Model Childhood, the mainland (Ames, Iowa), circa 1978-2001, 2018
HD video, DV family history video for insurance purposes, data point cloud generated by 3D scan and one car load of personal effects transported from Okiishi family basement, 2940 Monroe Drive, Ames, Iowa
Dimensions variable
Copyright The Artist
Further images
A Model Childhood is a meditation on the artist’s place of birth, the USA, as much as the concept of home itself, that place where one literally, inescapably comes from....
A Model Childhood is a meditation on the artist’s place of birth, the USA, as much as the concept of home itself, that place where one literally, inescapably comes from. For some people from migration backgrounds, a place of birth, in each generation, is insistently demarcated as a place that is not a home.
Against the backdrop of the emergent political orders in the USA, Europe and the UK, A Model Childhood brings four generations of migration and immigration histories into contact in the present (from the 1880s floating world of merchant- class Japan in tropical-melancholy Hawaii to Trump’s neo-fascist-style experiments in globalization-denial).
Performing a breakdown in historical/psychological chronology and logic that has emerged as a method of analysis on the left as it reacts to the seemingly impossible paradigm shifts enacted by the far right, Okiishi searches for “trans- historical patterns of xenophobia and racism,” “intersectional identity” and “intergenerational trauma”—but, as he has consistently approached the live-processing demanded of the contemporary artist, he both over- and under-performs what is required of him. Do you hail the call of interpellation, or do you run away screaming? Or do you do both at the same time?
Against the backdrop of the emergent political orders in the USA, Europe and the UK, A Model Childhood brings four generations of migration and immigration histories into contact in the present (from the 1880s floating world of merchant- class Japan in tropical-melancholy Hawaii to Trump’s neo-fascist-style experiments in globalization-denial).
Performing a breakdown in historical/psychological chronology and logic that has emerged as a method of analysis on the left as it reacts to the seemingly impossible paradigm shifts enacted by the far right, Okiishi searches for “trans- historical patterns of xenophobia and racism,” “intersectional identity” and “intergenerational trauma”—but, as he has consistently approached the live-processing demanded of the contemporary artist, he both over- and under-performs what is required of him. Do you hail the call of interpellation, or do you run away screaming? Or do you do both at the same time?