Trevor Shimizu

Your Face In The Mirror… @ Moran Bondaroff, Nov 19 – Dec 17

18 November 2016

The Your Face In The Mirror Isn’t Your Face, Similar To Plastic Silverware group exhibition is on at Los Angeles’ Moran Bondaroff, opening November 19 and running to December 17. 

Featuring 12 artists — including Trevor Shimizu, Steven Baldi, Anna Betbeze, Keltie Ferris and Marisa Takal — artist-curator Torey Thornton introduces the show with a statement, which interrogates the distinction (or lack there of) between representational and abstract art:

“The line between something that is recognizable and that which is less so or not at all can be thin or pushed; furthermore, it could be argued that all things are representational, and simultaneously, all things are abstract.

Thorton notes the exhibition aims to ‘flatten’ the notion of  abstraction, thereby allowing for the works to converse in closer proximity. Other contributors include Louise Fishman, Rosy Keyser, Cady Noland, Annie Pearlman, Odessa Straub, Rose Wylie and Kelly Zutrau. 

See the Moran Bondaroff website for details.**

Trevor Shimizu, New Work (2016). Exhibition view. Courtesy 47 Canal, New York.
Trevor Shimizu, New Work (2016). Exhibition view. Courtesy 47 Canal, New York.
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Mined Control @ As It Stands, Nov 17 – Dec 17

17 November 2016

The Mined Control group exhibition is on at Los Angeles’ As It Stands, opening November 17 and running to December 17.

Organized by Allison Littrell, the show features the work of Alison Veit, Brian Khek, Sara Grace Powell, Marton Robinson, Bunny Rogers and George Egerton-Warburton, and examines what the press release describes as “the hidden origins of the products and images that shape collective memory via pure surfaces.” 

The text goes on to note the systems of control and consumption that make up our physical bodies and questions whether the influence can be reversed: “Can we have an evolution of the utopian cyborgian identity and flip the mirror back onto ourselves?”

See the FB event page for details.**

Brian Khek, 'Straw Man (Brooklyn)' (2016). Install view. Courtesy American Medium, New York.
Brian Khek, ‘Straw Man (Brooklyn)’ (2016). Install view. Courtesy American Medium, New York.
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Trevor Shimizu @ 47 Canal reviewed

13 July 2016

“Try to imagine this abyss: dizzying visions. No identity lies therein. A mother’s identity survives only thanks to the well-known fact that consciousness is lulled by habit, wherein a woman protects herself along the frontier that divides her body and makes an expatriate of her child.” The subject of Julia Kristeva’s 1977 essay Sabat Mater is not the child —“irremediably alien” —but the mother-parent to which it only bears relation while carried inside of her. The mater dolorosa, merely signified by seven sorrows, weeping by her son’s corpse, is otherwise silenced, mute as she forcibly, indelibly, renounces her child to the social exteriors, which the immaculate womb once shielded against. It is this filial catastrophe, the fractures and abstract separation of parent and kin (however not rooted in Christian, woman-as-mother gender essentialism) that is explored in Trevor Shimizu’s solo exhibition New Work at 47 Canal, running from June 24 to July 30.

Trevor Shimizu, New Work (2016). Exhibition view. Courtesy 47 Canal, New York.
Trevor Shimizu, New Work (2016). Exhibition view. Courtesy 47 Canal, New York.

Immediately visible amongst the large canvas oil-paintings are a collection of comfort objects and icons: a teddy bear, a stuffed otter and companion starfish, the Dutch rabbit character Miffy —outside actors that facilitate peace for the parent to the extent in which they console the child. On the adjacent wall is ‘Baby Expert (Eating)’ painted with ill-defined, faint lines, vague silhouettes with blank-stares, exchanging tips (seeking relief) on getting their children to sleep. Two separate works depict sleep-deprived parents who appear as if they experienced forced-viewing torture à la Clockwork Orange: bloodshot, wilted eyes immune to stimulation. The bipedal robot-parent watching a video of robot fails before not-sleep is watching itself.

To what degree does a shirt collar or a nursing breast obfuscate the parent’s face as the child is held? ‘Breastfeeding in Public (1)’ shows the parent nursing with closed eyes, nearly permeated by harsh, grey brush strokes. The public sphere, too, widens the abyss between parent and child, as Shimizu notes public nursing is a “common scenario that can go well or very poorly”. The cultural submerges the natural, as it usually does. ‘Breast Pump’ elucidates another break, mechanizing nourishment, the silent child can be fed rooms apart from the silent mother after she forfeits milk to the machine. Kristeva promulgates that the classical, Christic Madonna’s release of milk and sorrowful tears helps to reify the ‘extralinguistic’ complexity of her child while ossifying the mother-subject as non-verbal.

Trevor Shimizu, 'Baby Expert (Walking)' (2016). Install view. Courtesy 47 Canal, New York.
Trevor Shimizu, ‘Baby Expert (Walking)’ (2016). Install view. Courtesy 47 Canal, New York.

Shimizu’s paintings of actress-model-businesswoman-celebrity Jessica Alba operate as a logical opposite of the aching, under-slept parent, showing one of the few human smiles amongst the works. Posing next to the company logo for her all-natural baby products, The Honest Company, Alba symbolizes the pathos of far-reaching materialist history (as objects are imbued with virulent sociability) that render our caretakers as ephemeral agents. The stalled logic of the maternity industry is that the FDA does not oversee pre-natal vitamins but is implicated in the pharmacological industry that manages our biology, beginning when the umbilical cord is cut.

The parent painted with weak outlines or sullen expressions, mostly obscured, delineates the conditions of their existence as one of servility to the outsides of the womb and child’s home: stuffed animals, the celebrity-mother, self-help books, structures that negate femmes metastasize throughout. If not defined solely by tears as is the crying Madonna, then New Work suggests the parent-caretaker may grasp at preservation, but never without resignation to eventual loss and coerced surrender of their child to the autoimmune planet folding into itself.**

Trevor Shimizu’s New Work is on at New York’s 47 Canal, running June 24 to July 30, 2016.

Header image: Trevor Shimizu, ‘Jessica Alba’ (2016). Courtesy 47 Canal, New York.

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Trevor Shimizu @ Evelyn Yard, Sep 9 – Oct 10

8 September 2015

Trevor Shimizu‘s Selected Works solo exhibition is on at London’s Evelyn Yard, opening September 9 and running to October 10.

The multidisciplinary artist works across a range of media including performance, video, sculpture, painting and drawing, taking part in the Melbourne’s Silly Canvas group show last year.

This new exhibition carries on with Shimizu’s concerns with the generic clichés of daily life, as informed by its representation in popular media. According to the press release, his paintings depict “sadly mundane and introspective household activities, [and] also suggest tragic psychologies of his protagonists.”

See the Evelyn Yard website for details.**

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Silly Canvas @ Utopian Slumps, Dec 15 – 22

15 December 2014

Melbourne’s Utopian Slumps gallery is teaming up with Centre for Style for the Silly Canvas group exhibition, running at the gallery space from December 15 to December 22.

The gallery and the Centre for Style exhibition space and retail store are joining forces again to host and curate, respectively, Silly Canvas, which will feature 14 various artists and artist collectives – including Amalia Ulman, ffiXXedMarlie Mul and Trevor Shimizu – working within the restricted parameters of two rectangular pieces of material attached to one another to form a two-sided wearable canvas. 

The December 15 opening kicks off with a panel and performance byAnna-Sophie Berger on the following Thursday, December 18, titled The Styled Canvas: fashion’s image and its various production lines and featuring D&K, Briony Wright and Robyn Healy in a discussion of “how image and styling mitigate fashion practice”.

The exhibition comes in conjunction with the launch of a Centre for Style publication, Centre for Style Rag, which is posited as a response to the themes of Silly Canvas and is comprised of texts by six writers, including Harry Burke, and artist pages by another five, including Dena Yago.

See the Silly Canvas exhibition page for details. **

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