All The (Healing) Parts: Shizuka Kusayanagi and Faith-Ann Young

DMST is proud to present a duo show, All The (Healing) Parts, by artists Shizuka Kusayanagi and Faith-Ann Kiwa Young, September 14th–October 19th, 2024. Featuring paintings and comic drawings by Shizuka as well as photographic composites and textile sculptures by Faith-Ann, the exhibition examines the multi-dimensionality of one’s identity, emotional landscape, and the interwoven process of healing. In our society, healing can often feel inaccessible—reserved for those with time, funds, and privilege. Usually those who are historically marginalized and need it most have the least amount of access to it. While diverse and highly populated, Los Angeles can also feel very isolated, disparaging, and lonely for those seeking refuge and community. These two artists have united to create a soft, safe, accessible space for healing for the community as a means of combating communal malaise, exhaustion, trauma, and dis-ease through creation, installation, sound, meditative activity, community meals, + conversation. “Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being.

If we create conditions and environments where adults feel safe and where they can thrive, we can begin to heal,” noted Bessel Van Der Kolk in The Body Keeps Score. These two artists' paths converged earlier this year, when Faith-Ann selected Shizuka’s art to be featured in the arts and culture festival Kibō Nobori, which she founded to bring hope (“kibo” in Japanese) to Little Tokyo and showcase a mix of Japanese traditions and new emerging Japanese-American talent and AAPI talent. They then bonded over their commonalities—both as cross-cultural nomads linked by Japanese roots and influences, moms of two balancing life and creation, and as intuitive artists channeling their emotions into cathartic works provoking personal and collective spiritual renewal.

This sentiment also united them with DMST, an artist-run gallery, founded in 2021 by Marantz Moon & Frannie Hemmelgarn, committed to creating space for the community at large to convene, converse, and commune. This is so aptly demonstrated by feeding 60-100 people in their monthly community feeds, for which they have become known. Throughout the lifespan of the exhibition, the space will be programmed with workshops, conversations, and activities hosted by the artists, gallerists, collaborators, and healer practitioners to further activate the environment with soulful nourishment, education, and acts of communion.