Camouflage Net Project Statement
In 1942, my father was born at Tule Lake Relocation Center, as an enemy citizen of the United States, his only crime was that he was a Japanese American. For the next and first three years of his life, he lived in the squalor of incarceration, with his mother, his father who worked across the road at a farm labor camp, his grandparents, and his aunts and uncles, many of whom were elementary and high school students. Also in the year 1942, the US Government commissioned Dorothea Lange to document the lives of Japanese-Americans at Manzanar Relocation Center, a camp in the desert northeast of Los Angeles. Among her images were photos of young men and women weaving camouflage nets as prison labor for the US Army. When I saw these images, my preconceptions of camp labor were overturned, from farm labor and camp logistics to the handiwork of weaving.
As a descendant of the camp experience, I have many questions and even more unknowns. This is a history that had been covered up, that had been suppressed, out of trauma and shame, forgetfulness and ultimately death. Despite the great scholarship on JA incarceration that has evolved since the 1980s, we have so many personal questions to ask our grandparents and great-grandparents that can never be answered, and even if they came back to life, there is a good chance they would not be completely honest. Everything they did and said was to protect us. As the earlier generations tended to do so much physical labor, particularly in camp, they hoped for us that we wouldn't experience this kind of toil. Weaving the nets has been a way to get in touch with them, to connect my working hands with theirs, and try to empathize and imagine what they were thinking in the many difficult decisions of navigating camp life and the years after. I weave the materiality of kimono fabric to send pride of heritage back to this era, while the use of children's fabric points to the recent incarceration of immigrant families in the US. I reread this technology of war that protects people and objects by blending them into their surroundings, to instead be a discrimination filter for today, through which we see the true nature of people as interconnected with each other and the world.
As a descendant of the camp experience, I have many questions and even more unknowns. This is a history that had been covered up, that had been suppressed, out of trauma and shame, forgetfulness and ultimately death. Despite the great scholarship on JA incarceration that has evolved since the 1980s, we have so many personal questions to ask our grandparents and great-grandparents that can never be answered, and even if they came back to life, there is a good chance they would not be completely honest. Everything they did and said was to protect us. As the earlier generations tended to do so much physical labor, particularly in camp, they hoped for us that we wouldn't experience this kind of toil. Weaving the nets has been a way to get in touch with them, to connect my working hands with theirs, and try to empathize and imagine what they were thinking in the many difficult decisions of navigating camp life and the years after. I weave the materiality of kimono fabric to send pride of heritage back to this era, while the use of children's fabric points to the recent incarceration of immigrant families in the US. I reread this technology of war that protects people and objects by blending them into their surroundings, to instead be a discrimination filter for today, through which we see the true nature of people as interconnected with each other and the world.
Artist Bio
Tara Tamaribuchi is an artist based in Seattle, WA. She began her art career as a painter and shifted her practice to work across mediums a decade ago. Her recent exhibitions of the Camouflage Net Project have taken place at the Seattle University Hedreen gallery and at Galpão in Vila Magdelena, São Paulo, Brazil. Other projects include museum intervention Awakening the Buddha at Seatle Art Museum, the first showing of Groove Bardos at Mass MoCA, and curating a web exhibition, Reimagining the Future Through the Past for the Washington State Arts Commission. She is a leader in the effort to save more than 100 Seattle art studios from redevelopment at the Inscape Arts Building, the former INS immigration and detention center in the Seattle Chinatown International District. As an artist, she has been building support from city, county, state and federal leaders, and leading creative placemaking efforts by collaborating with cultural institutions including On The Boards, Wa Na Wari, and the Wing Luke Museum. Learn more about that project here. She is a member of Soil Gallery, and holds an MFA in Visual Art from Lesley Art+Design, a BFA in Painting from Pacific Northwest College of Art, and a BA in Journalism from George Washington University.
www.taratamaribuchi.com
Tara Tamaribuchi is an artist based in Seattle, WA. She began her art career as a painter and shifted her practice to work across mediums a decade ago. Her recent exhibitions of the Camouflage Net Project have taken place at the Seattle University Hedreen gallery and at Galpão in Vila Magdelena, São Paulo, Brazil. Other projects include museum intervention Awakening the Buddha at Seatle Art Museum, the first showing of Groove Bardos at Mass MoCA, and curating a web exhibition, Reimagining the Future Through the Past for the Washington State Arts Commission. She is a leader in the effort to save more than 100 Seattle art studios from redevelopment at the Inscape Arts Building, the former INS immigration and detention center in the Seattle Chinatown International District. As an artist, she has been building support from city, county, state and federal leaders, and leading creative placemaking efforts by collaborating with cultural institutions including On The Boards, Wa Na Wari, and the Wing Luke Museum. Learn more about that project here. She is a member of Soil Gallery, and holds an MFA in Visual Art from Lesley Art+Design, a BFA in Painting from Pacific Northwest College of Art, and a BA in Journalism from George Washington University.
www.taratamaribuchi.com