Multimedia installation (35 minutes), 2017
Video(16:35 minutes) and bookwork. 

dawn to dust, is a multi-media installation comprised of audio, animations, video and sculpture.  The animations are housed within architectural viewing spaces based on drawings from memory by my father and his siblings of an old and abandoned shack house that was one of the post war "homes" that my father's moved to in Japan following the release of Japanese Canadians from the internment camps of B.C. in 1949.  During this time, Japanese Canadians went through a second uprooting designed as the final solution to the so-called Japanese problem in Canada. Two policies were announced: 'dispersal' and 'repatriation' - my family took 'repatriation' (return to Japan). My father’s family, along with at 4000 Japanese Canadians, were sent to a country with poor economic and living conditions due to the war; a country they had never known and where they would still feel quite alienated.[1]

The installation incorporates ephemera and the actions of memory work as seen through video, drawing and photographs. These ‘documentary’ elements are juxtaposed with the imagined ‘story’ of this place told through the cinematic eye of 5 fictional characters (a house snake, a meijiro bird, a shepherd dog, a ghost, and a stone statue). What remains is a recollection of place and home that is called into question in relationship to history and exile; as it attempts to make sense of childhood as it is interrupted by the effects of war and the unreliability of memory.

[1] Roy Miki and Cassandra Kobayashi. Justice InOur Time. The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement. Talon Books. 1991. (49)

Production Credits: 

Sound Design: Antoine Bédard
Carpentry Prep: Marc Hansen
Editing: Cande Andrade
Camera: Asa Mori and Catrina Megumi Longmuir
Stop motion assistance: Agustina Santoso, Cherry Wen Wen Lu, Minoru Yamamoto, Kazuho Yamamoto
Story Dramaturg: Anita Rochon
Voice Narration: Maiko Yamamoto, James Long, Alex Ferguson, Cindy Mochizuki, Marco Soriano

Lines to Remember bookwork was produced with Light Factory Publications.

This project was made possible with the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council.