Mika Yokota: YOUR GOD ONCE LOOKED LIKE YOU
Residency Art Gallery is pleased to present our first artist-led project of 2023 from Mika Yokota, titled Your God Once Looked Like You. This exhibition will run from February 11th through February 26th, 2023 with an opening reception on February 11th from 6p-9p. This collection of work is presented in conjunction with Mika Yokota's MFA Thesis exhibition at Otis College of Art & Design titled Legibility of a Human.
This collection of work is created in collaboration with the spirits. The goal of this exhibition is to create a space where the matrilineal ancestors reveal themselves and offer antidotal wisdom through music, ritual, embodiment practices and community care. By connecting pathways to one's ancestors, the hope is to bring viewers a sense of belonging after generations of displacement, oppression, colonialism and the ongoing rippling consequences of cultural wounding.
This project is in devotion to the ways in which Asians can be made more legible as human outside of tragedy and acts of service. Your God Once Looked Like You explores the theme of reclaiming the cultural landscape of the East Asian American diaspora through the lens of an ancestorial matriarchy. This project seeks out the reclamation of the femme intuition and the access to erotic bodily knowledge as quiding sources. Yokota honors the use of the sensual, physical, emotional and psychic expressions that exists in each of us to inform life pursuits that bring us the most joy and fulfillment. Yokota seeks to ask what are the visual and somatic clues that your body is being conquered, and in what ways can we reach the euphoric?
Mika Yokota (b. 1985, Kyoto, Japan) is a Japanese-American immigrant living and working in Los Angeles. She studied illustration and painting at Art Center College of Design and is currently pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design. Mika has worked experimentally across genres including drawing, painting, printmaking, ceramics, music, and performance art. In her printmaking and paintings, figures and symbols tumble together to discover what it means to reclaim the femme intuition and the access to bodily knowledge as a guiding source. Music and ceremony are explored to thin the veil between this world and ancestral spirits. Her work offers discourse on East Asian diaspora and the ways in which Asians can be made more legible as human in Western society. Previously, Mika studied for two years as a printmaking artist-inresidence at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA. Her work has been shown at the Kala Art Gallery, Judson Gallery, Athens B Gallery, The Gallalery, Proxy Place Gallery, Berkeley Civic Arts Center and a permanent mural resides at the Meta Headquarters.