Transplant
- Transplant
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Transplant. © 2009 Heidi Kumao.
Emerging from the intersection of sculpture, theater, and engineering, Heidi Kumao’s video and machine art generates artistic spectacles in order to visualize the unseen: thought patterns, mental states, emotions, compulsions, and dreams. Through the creation of hybrid art forms (kinetic sculptures, animations, and interactive works), she explores the psychological underpinnings of everyday situations and institutional contexts, such as the nuclear family, mainstream media, and traditional gender roles. Transplant explores the lives of Japanese nationals and citizens who were interned in War Relocation Centers in the dusty desert of California during World War II, and how they cultivated gardens as a creative outlet to survive their confinement. Despite the horrendous conditions, residents of these “camps” constructed beautifully landscaped parks, ponds, and rock gardens. Transplant pays homage to their ingenuity and personal drive to transform gravel into gardens, altering their built environment as an act of defiance. This piece is part of the project Timed Release, a continuing series of intimate theater pieces about surviving confinement, supported by a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. [End Page 368]
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Transplant. © 2009 Heidi Kumao.
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Heidi Kumao University of Michigan School of Art & Design Ann Arbor, Michigan USA hkumao@umich.edu www.heidikumao.net
Heidi Kumao received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an associate professor at the School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan. Kumao has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in one-person exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; and Center for the Arts, Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco. Group exhibition venues include ZeroOne San Jose, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, Wing Luke Asian Art Museum in Seattle, and the National Academy Museum in New York City. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, ArtPapers, and Sculpture Magazine, and is held in a number of private and public collections. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, American Association of University Women, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
