For this month’s Fridays & Friends, I’d like to introduce you to Emi Kodama. I met Emi almost ten years ago in Vancouver, but since then she has been living and making art in Europe, and we see each other every few years when we happen to be in the same city. And Emi will be in Vancouver again next month – details of a performance in the Q&A below. The great thing about this Fridays & Friends series is that I get to share work by talented artists, but it’s also become a great way of staying in touch and up-to-date with what my friends are up to; I always learn something new about their work and I have always been pleasantly surprised by their fun facts!
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Roselina Hung: How did we first meet?
Emi Kodama: We first met at Centre A, back when it was at the old location, on Homer Street. I was there on co-op from Emily Carr and you were volunteering, and we were both trying to get a peek into the art world. We often had the same hours and there wasn’t much to do besides count the number of visitors, so we sat together at the big glass table and got to know each other.
RH: Tell me a bit about yourself…
EK: I’m from Surrey, BC and studied at Emily Carr. Then I went on exchange to AKI, in Enschede, The Netherlands and loved it so much that I transferred there for my fourth year and graduated in photography. I have a long academic career, actually. I went on to do my Masters at the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen. After that, I moved to Ghent, Belgium and went to the HISK, which was more like a residency than a school. I’ve been living here for about four and a half years now and started a PhD in the Arts between the University of Ghent and the KASK, which is the art school here. I’ve stayed in academia for so long because I like the framework it provides – I belong to a community of really inspiring professors and an international group of artists.
RH: Tell me about your work…
EK: Most important to me in my work is telling stories. I explore their many forms through a multidisciplinary practice that includes video, photography, drawing, writing, and performance. My work focuses on the every day and it’s probably most comparable to the short stories of Raymond Carver. After reading the first paragraph of one of his stories, I felt like, “I could have written that.” He writes about daily struggles with a minimalism that emphasizes brevity and intensity and I also try to be precise about the commonplace in a way that sheds new light on familiar objects and situations. My work is biographical on the surface, but the initial sense of familiarity is often undermined by gaps that leave one with a feeling of alienation. It de-familiarizes the commonplace and subverts expectations: social norms are questioned and ideas of right/wrong and good/bad become constructions based on circumstance. The discrepancy between different parts of my stories evokes the ambiguity of situations in daily life and the discomfort of facing conflicting thoughts. I often think of my work as an optical illusion, where the perception of something objectively existing causes misinterpretation of its true nature.
RH: What are you currently working on?
EK: I finished a residency at Be-Part, an art platform in Waregem, in January and the artist book I was working on there just came out. It’s called “If I Were You”, and it’s a collection of short stories and drawings, which are snapshots taken by Anna, who is constantly looking. It’s all about what she sees, sometimes also wrongly or mistakenly, and dreams, memory, and imagination blur the boundary between the visible and the hidden.
It was presented during a performance where I invited people to sit with me and choose a word out of the index. I read them the story while they closed their eyes, pictured the story, and made a drawing. I will also do the performance at the Motto bookstore at the Or Gallery in June. I will let you know the exact time and date soon!
RH: Where can people find your work?
EK: You can see a preview of my book “If I Were You” here, my Vimeo page, and I’m also working on a website, www.emikodama.com, that will be up by the end of May.
RH: Tell me one fun fact about yourself.
EK: I have a secret passion for ballroom dancing and dream of being in a competition one day, wearing a flowing gown that may or may not have sequins.
Thank you Emi! I will update this post when I get details of Emi’s performance in June at the Or Gallery and if you are in Vancouver, I encourage you all to see her work!
And whenever one is presented with a choice of sequins or no sequins, always, always go with sequins.
Read past Fridays & Friends posts here.