Walking Across the Pacific

“Walking Across the Pacific”

As part of Open Engagement 2013 please join us for the artists’ talk and reception Monday May 20th from 5:00 – 7:30 at The Best Art Gallery in Portland, 1468 NE Alberta St.

On June 6, 2012 the Misawa pier arrived on the Oregon coast. Although this gigantic debris floated for over a year in the Pacific it contained over a hundred varieties of organisms on it. The same Ocean that carries debris also carries us, one Japanese artist and one American, as we seek to form new relationships with the social landscape we inhabit. We are pursuing these currents in the Pacific by nurturing stories, questions and dialogues occurring in our time of uncertainty. The multiplicity of each person and place we encounter is crucial to this ongoing project.

Walking Across the Pacific consists of public walks held with an intimate group of people: telling stories while walking. We believe stories are the fertile compost from which plants grow in the medium of social networks. Over the past three years we have held five participatory workshops in Hawai‘i, Hokkaido and Tokyo together. Our goal is to create a shared dynamic reality from these rich stories, not in the universal sense but particular reality that is lived by each of us. This project consists of an ongoing engagement with the social landscape.