Artist in Residence: Allie Tsubota

During her time in residence in the Heimbold Visual Arts Center at Sarah Lawrence College, Allie Tsubota will prepare two multimedia works for installation in the forthcoming group exhibition, “In the Room.” Through video, photographs, and textual works, Tsubota will tend to the survival strategies of Asian/American intimacy and pleasure amid historical and contemporary landscapes of violence. The installations will include two large-scale video projections (“I am not sand” and “Bathers Interior”), a collection of texts and research materials, and a series of photographic prints.

In “I am not sand, they told me,” Tsubota interrogates the strategies of the U.S. immigration system of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which was forged and refined on the bodies of Asian migrants, who–under exclusionary legal codes and the biometrics of photography–were surveilled, policed, and un/made at the border. “I am not sand” unravels the (white) racial and sexual anxieties that de/formed one Asian migrant into an impossible figure, and one who, years later, remains an indecipherable archival fragment.

“Bathers Interior” addresses Asian/American desire through a different “grammar.” “Bathers Interior” adapts a minor scene in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964, Japan) to meditate on desire and disappearance through the lens of the cinematic. By re-staging Teshigahara’s scene, Tsubota is interested in “bathing” as a distant metaphor for assimilation, and as a self-effacing act that negotiates longing, intimacy, and survival.

Tsubota will be on campus, inviting visitors into the gallery workspace to view the development of her work during weekly open hours. Additionally, faculty will have the unique opportunity to schedule class studio visits to engage with Tsubota and the ever-changing space.

The Heimbold Gallery Workspace Residency Program dynamically bridges the classroom and art world by reframing our gallery space as an extension of the artist’s studio. Participating artists are provided with time, funding, student assistance and access to fabrication facilities. In this exchange, the college supports the artist, enabling them to explore new ideas, materials, and processes. Simultaneously, the institution benefits from the artist's creative contributions within an academic setting. During the course of their residency the artist will provide open hours and participate in Visual and Studio Arts programming. Classes from across the college will have the opportunity to schedule appointments (as well as walk-ins on Fridays) to engage with the artist and visit the evolving space.

Allie Tsubota (she/her) is an artist exploring intersections of race, visuality, and the formation of historical memory. Her work joins photography, video, photographic and cinematic archives, and text to examine the role of visual spectatorship across racialized space and collapsed historical time. Tsubota has received recognitions from Aperture, Google’s Creator Lab, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and PhMuseum, among others, and has been an artist-in-residence with Headlands Center for the Arts, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and ARCUS Project. Her works have been exhibited across the United States and in Japan. Tsubota holds an MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design, and presently teaches photography at Parsons School of Design and The College of New Jersey.