“con.Text” 2017 to present

Bakersfield Museum of Art
“Bryan Ida : Life of Change: A Retrospective”

Sept 28th, 2023 – Jan 6th, 2024

In 2017 after Trump was inaugurated as president one of the first action he wanted to take was to ban people from Muslim based countries from entering the United States. He took to twitter to justify the Muslim Ban and it reminded me of the Internment of Japanese Americans during WWII of which my parents were both interned.

The idea came to me to render my neighbor, whom I frequently saw in her Niqab going to temple for service on Saturday mornings, with the words of Trump’s tweets which were so damaging to her.

This first portrait took about three months to finish as I endlessly wrote out trumps tweets, figuring out the shadows and highlights and trying to make his words inert and harmless, word upon word making them illegible and powerless.

“Neighbor” 60 x 37 ink on panel 2017

The second is a portrait of my grandmother inspired by a photograph taken by Dorothea Lange when she was commissioned to photograph Japanese Americans being interned during the start of the US entry into World War II. This shot was taken in San Francisco as my grandmother and her family waited to board a bus for an internment camp in Utah.

The words used to make the marks that compose this portrait are the text from the Immigration Act of 1917, which barred most immigration from Asia.

These portraits are the first in the series and the latest portrait I have completed. There are 24 in “con.Text” so far.

“Grandmother” 60 x 37 ink on panel 2023

Original photo by Dorothea Lange, 1942.