{"id":396340,"date":"2026-04-25T01:51:24","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T01:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/396340\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T01:51:24","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T01:51:24","slug":"an-eyewitness-to-dictatorship-artist-testifies-to-family-history-in-material-haiku-mmxxvi-at-carbondale-arts-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/396340\/","title":{"rendered":"An eyewitness to dictatorship: Artist testifies to family history in \u201cMaterial Haiku MMXXVI\u201d at Carbondale Arts Gallery\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

To create, Colorado-Springs based artist Gaby Oshiro<\/a> first destroys.<\/p>\n

She burns, rips, tears and stabs, using mulberry paper, pumice, bamboo and natural pigments to craft pieces composed of the scars of their creation. As Oshiro\u2019s artist statement says, \u201cThese works do not decorate; they testify.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over 60 of her pieces are on display at the Carbondale Arts Gallery<\/a> in \u201cMaterial Haiku MMXXVI,\u201d one of the gallery\u2019s two current exhibitions.<\/p>\n

The pieces she creates reflect her scars, too.<\/p>\n

Oshiro was born in Buenos Aires. In the 1970s her father, labor lawyer Oscar Takashi Oshiro, was kidnapped by Argentina\u2019s military dictatorship and became one of the 30,000 desaparecido, or \u201cdisappeared.\u201d Her family never uncovered what happened to him.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were curfews, you couldn\u2019t read what you wanted. They were burning books,\u201d Oshiro said, describing what it was like to live under a dictatorship. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t watch whatever you wanted, you had to watch what they said\u00a0 (You had to listen) to music that they approved of.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was not a nice place for a long time,\u201d she added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For years, her work has reflected the constant presence of her father\u2019s absence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the work that I do is connected to that absence,\u201d Oshiro said. \u201cThe void, which is also Ma, in Japanese, is an emptiness, but it\u2019s not negative space, like they said here in the western world.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn that emptiness, it shows what is not there and the potential it has involved,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

Two years ago, a curator from a Denver gallery asked Oshiro if she could paint about the dictatorship.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t, actually, because it was like remembering those people on TV giving all the rules to live by, and so I decided to do more about what I was feeling,\u201d Oshiro said. \u201cThe first one of the series I started with Shodo, which is Japanese calligraphy with ink, you use sumi ink, which is also like char.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a meditative process. But when Oshiro finished the piece, she put it on canvas and started stabbing it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a very violent kind of thing,\u201d she said. \u201cI remember when they took my dad, they burned all his documents in his office, so that, made me start using actual fire instead of paint.\u201d<\/p>\n

This idea culminated into \u201cMaterial Haiku MMXXVI\u201d which opened at the Carbondale Arts Gallery on April 17.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m the eyewitness of (my dad\u2019s) absence, the eyewitness of the dictatorship, so everything that I\u2019ve been through, it goes into the work that I\u2019ve been doing: the fragments, the layering.\u201d Oshiro said. \u201cOn the other side of the (gallery) wall\u2026it\u2019s d\u00e9collage, which is when you put in a lot of layers and then you pull them out, and it\u2019s like time passing through it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not perfect, but I use the wabi-sabi philosophy\u2026beauty stands on the imperfect,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

The name of the exhibition, \u201cMaterial Haiku MMXXVI,\u201d is a reference to Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s famous ideology that painting is visual poetry. It also honors her family\u2019s history.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Her great uncle was a painter and a poet who wrote a haiku a day. \u201cThe haiku is embedded (in my family),\u201d Oshiro said.<\/p>\n

When her uncle passed away at over 100 years old in 2012, Oshiro inherited many of his journals, some of which contained translations from Japanese poets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Visual poetry, a representation of political injustice, physical transformation and scars: her exhibition is all of it. But once on display, Oshiro lets her work speak for itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe work, at the end, is like a mirror,\u201d Oshiro said. \u201c(Viewers) bring their own experiences and they can take their own\u2026whatever they feel, it is probably right, because we all have different walks of life.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To create, Colorado-Springs based artist Gaby Oshiro first destroys. She burns, rips, tears and stabs, using mulberry paper,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":396341,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-396340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396340\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/396341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}