Granary Arts is pleased to present new exhibitions:

Hatsubon / Tomiko Jones

Hatsubon is a memorial exhibition for the artists’ father and explores the dynamic tension between tradition and performance – the diaphanous space between life and death. The materiality of the work suggests the dualities of the ephemeral and the corporeal, and the pendulous state between longing and release.

The ceremony of hatsubon marks the first anniversary of a loved one’s death, held during the yearly ritual of Obon, a Japanese Buddhist custom honoring ancestors. A ritual for the deceased is the sending of a small vessel – shoryobune – to sea. Jones created her own version by splitting, steaming, and bending bamboo into a boat form and skinning it with waxed kōzo paper. She sewed yukatta, simple cotton kimonos, and on the dawn of her father’s hatsubon, sent the boat to sea from the shores of Hawai’i in his honor.

Hatsubon visits three geographic sites of significance: her father’s birthplace, along a river he grew up on; her mother’s birthplace where they set the boat to sea, and where he is buried; and the place where her parents met, and she was born.

Throughout time communities and cultures have sent many of their young ones off to sea to find a better life on the other shore; at the other end of a lifetime, the ocean is home to our many rituals of death, both a vehicle and destination for the final journey of our loved ones. With this exhibition we travel to Jones’ unnamed coast – where the river meets the sea – to ritually set free the spirit and body of her father.

About the Artist

Tomiko Jones’ work is linked to place, exploring transitions in the landscape through social, cultural and geographical terms. Her work considers the twin crises of too much and too little in the age of climate change. Water is ever present, as site of cultural practice, economic imperative, and locus of spiritual belief. A loose mapping that echoes the internal terrain is imaged through photographic works and site-responsive multidisciplinary installations. Her recent project “Hatsubon” is a memorial exhibition in photography and video installation.

Jones is an Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison and serves on the Board of Directors of the Society for Photographic Education. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Photography with a Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Arizona in Tucson. She is the recipient of awards including the Center for Photography at Woodstock AIR Program, En Foco New Works Fellowship (New York), 4Culture and CityArtists (Seattle), and Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes (France). Tomiko was an invited Resident Artist at Museé Niépce in Chalon-Sur-Saône, and a Fellow at The Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France.

www.tomikojonesphoto.com

Lydia Gravis / Survival and Resilience

Driven by her desire to respond to the intangible human experience, Lydia Gravis creates empathic work. She uses mark-making as a way to connect to the external world as well as the world within. This effort serves as a radical act of sanity, imperative as she navigates the often-overwhelming nature of the contemporary world.

As Gravis creates colonies of marks and lines, they become personified in her mind and assume individual behaviors. Can she make them cooperate? Can a line re-write a troubling human narrative? Rather than working from the specific to the abstract, Gravis begins with an abstract essence, like the idea of liminal psychological space, and suggests its specificity through visual language. She uses mark-making and obsessive micro-textures to express the tension between overwhelming experiences she does not understand, while simultaneously being seduced by her desire to understand them more clearly. By conjuring and obscuring biomorphic shapes with graphite and water media, she depicts the infinite psychological spaces of human experience, giving the illusion of form to what is simultaneously formless.

This body of work evolved from life experiences that include profound grief and immense personal growth, much like what we have collectively endured over the last two years during the COVID-19 pandemic.

About the Artist

Lydia Gravis earned her BA in painting and drawing from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC, in 2003 and her MFA in visual art from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in 2013. Her work has been shown in numerous group and juried exhibitions in the United States. Her solo exhibitions include Northern Arizona University Museum of Art, Nox Contemporary, Phillips Gallery, and Argo House Gallery in Utah. Gravis was recently awarded an artist residency at the Fremantle Art Center in Fremantle, Western Australia for Summer 2022. She works as the Gallery Director and Curator of the Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery within the Department of Visual Art and Design at Weber State University, and currently lives in Ogden, Utah with her husband and two young children.

www.lydiagravis.com