Kumi Yamashita

February 23 – March 22, 2008

I have had the experience of traveling and living in various parts of the world. Religious controversies, racial discrimination, misunderstanding, and prejudgment began affecting me early in life. As a teenager, when I was frustrated and puzzled by conventional viewpoints, I began to appreciate both the willingness to learn about what is unfamiliar and the ability to see familiar things from different viewpoints.

I try to deal with these issues through my work as an artist. I began using letter, numbers, and shadows to illustrate our tendancy to define what we see by transformin it into something already known.

I want to remind ourselves of how we preconceive what is around and inside us. It is easy to passively turn to prepared information. Knowledge, ideas, and values are too often accepted without questioning. -KY

Kumi Yamashita studied at the Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, and the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. She has exhibited extensively worldwide and recently completed several public commissions in Tokyo, Glasgow, and Seattle. Yamashita has been invited to the following artist residency programs, including the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony, New York, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Nebraska, and most recently the Roswell Artist's Fellowship Program in New Mexico. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Award, the Artist Trust Award, and The Kirin Art Award.