Where are you from?
It’s the type of question that seems like it would have an easy answer, but for artist Lisa Solomon it’s so much more.
“I’ve been asked that question my entire life, and there has always been this strange wanting to put in a box behind [whatever I answer],” Solomon said.
In this conundrum, the Oakland-based artist has found a path to expression in her abstract mixed-media art showcase Cellular Memory, currently running at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (SLOMA).
“Everything I do is rooted in something I’m interested in,” she said. “Then I do a heck of a lot of research and make a body of work surrounding that.”
The exhibition, which runs until Aug. 28, features a collection of work from Solomon’s extensive career, including self-portraits, photo re-creations, and net-like sculpture pieces centered on her research on her part-Japanese, part-Jewish ancestry.
Solomonāwho was born in Tucson, Arizona, and raised in both Southern and Central Californiaāhas had pieces featured across the country, including exhibits in San Jose; Wichita, Kansas; and Washington, D.C. Cellular Memory serves as a collection of some of the past pieces featured in her many exhibitions.
The SLOMA exhibit features a set of five portraits that focus on her complex ancestry as the daughter of a Jewish father and immigrated Japanese mother and all of the positive and negative history that is associated with it.
“I checked in with my dad and remember my grandparents talking about where their parents are from,” she said. “So some of these portraits are me grappling with that question [of where I am from], and the others are based around the places I actually have heritage.”
Solomon describes the five portraits as a blend of mugshots, a three-quarter view, and a standard portrait, which all stem from different perspectives of her heritage she found via research.
“Luckily, there are five places I have real heritage from,” she said with a laugh.
Other pieces in the exhibition, like the 535-knot netāAmimeāexplore the numerical and cultural significance of Japanese fishing and hunting practices.
“This net pattern is a sort of wave pattern, and it’s a constant in Japanese culture as it’s supposed to be good luck for fishermen,” Solomon said. “I was curious if I could pull off this knot pattern while also featuring the wave idea.”
Her finished piece is intended to showcase the range of colors that are important to Japanese culture.
“[Amime] has five different shades of blue as its background because I didn’t want the knots to sit in just one color,” she said. “So it has a wave pattern literally and also features waves of different colors.”
The spectrum of color also relates to the different aspects of her ancestry that sometimes are less celebrated or less acknowledged than others.
In her research, Solomon delved into some of the darker aspects of Japanese American historyāspecifically the U.S. interment of people of Japanese descent during World War II.
“I had never learned about it my entire life growing up in California,” she said. “You only had to be 1/16 Japanese to be put into the camps so I was like, well, my mom would have to go, I would have to go, and my kid would have to go.”
In a series of re-created photographs, Solomon conveys the dark and somber nature of the internment camps, highlighting the anti-Japanese sentiment of the time and the deception under which the U.S. government moved them into camps.
“They called the interment ‘evacuation,’ like they were evacuating them, but really they were just putting them into camps,” she said. “These shops [owned by Japanese Americans] had signs that said ‘closing out evacuation sale,’ which seems like something that is kind of pleasant, but is not pleasant at all.”
Solomon doesn’t focus entirely on the negative in her re-created photographs, as there are both literal and figurative layers of resilience at play. Ultimately, celebrating resilience is at the core of Solomon’s artistic explorationāsomething she hopes can inspire people who see the images to appreciate both the positive and negative parts of where they come from.
“Thinking about [where I am from] and researching that was heavy,” she said. “But it was also oddly cathartic.” Ī
Staff Writer Adrian Vincent Rosas is researching and appreciating his Los Angeles Chicano roots. Reach him at arosas@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jul 20-30, 2023.