Landscape, Mythology and Intimations of Mortality Uncommon Traits: Re/Locating Asia is an exhibition proposed to create a broader spectrum of voices, viewpoints and redefinitions of the Asian/American and Asian/Canadian experience. Explorations of artistic diversity within the varying backgrounds of the participants serve to disintegrate the stereotypical barriers that prevent the growth of wider contexts and richer discourse. That the show is structured along geographic lines creates an environment for investigation that is less defined by socio-political factors and less bordered by cultural definitions to develop a more diverse social landscape. Within this social landscape, artist Patrick Nagatani explores a multiplicity of meanings associated with it in his imagery. Just as the exhibition on a larger scale expands notions of identity within a geographic frame, Nagatani's work expands themes of identity, personal and cultural history, mortality and theater in a dialogue with and about landscape. All of his work is informed by historical research and reflects a sense of dislocation in time and events which occurred in other time periods or were fabricated entirely for the camera. Mortality would not exist without time and history and all of his images reflect a sense of mortality whether it is in the direct threat of nuclear annihilation or in the subtlety of the solitary journey through an emotional landscape. The various terrains he crosses serve as theatrical sets in which a multitude of cultural mythologies and dramas unfold. In the work created (1983-89) from his collaboration with Andrée Tracey, landscape is a cultural terrain surveyed with a critical and darkly humorous eye. While many issues such as cultural apathy and the depredations of consumerism were addressed singularly in this work, they dovetailed together as contributors to the larger theme of nuclear destruction and the attempt to image the unimaginable. The technical demands of the Polaroid 20"x 24" instant camera created more specific concerns with the uniqueness of the materials and studio process that helped to define the style of the work. Creating artwork in this manner became a performance for the camera in which both of the artists balanced the illusion of spontaneity in the depiction of unexpected events with the meticulous preparation required to fabricate the scenes in the studio. With the series Nuclear Enchantment (1988-91), Nagatani continues the ideas that began their development in the collaborative work, but sharpens the focus of the theme and specificity of the ideas to the history and landscape of New Mexico, where the first nuclear weapon was created. While the strings that literally held the sets together and suspended the props were left showing in the earlier Polaroid pieces, they disappear in this series forcing the audience to suspend its disbelief, instead. The more obvious constructions of landscape and reality in the earlier work give way to more seamlessly blended tableaus of desert, mythology, and intimations of mortality that serve as possible alternatives (or challenges) to a cultural reality with so many informational gaps and voids of logic as to be less than credible. Sets of binary oppositions such as sacred/profane, portentous/ banal, beauty/horror, create a subjective space in which values are leveled so that all aspects of threat and splendor are viewed in the same apocalyptic light. The landscape itself is both a backdrop in the theater of culture and an abject character that reveals the ritual scars and abuses of technology that have marked its sacrificial body. Though the Novellas (1993-94) are the only works in the group that do not feature more conventional representations of landscape, they are a reflection of a more personal terrain comprised of visual spaces circumscribed by memory and experience. Dreams, anxiety, solitude and internal exploration are represented in a manner that reflects Nagatani's interest in magical realist literature. In this approach, another permutation is added to the set of alternatives to a reality that is lacking in definitives. The obsessive covering of objects with images suggests a desire to mitigate loneliness with the activity of filling a space, much as a prisoner records the passage of days with marks on a wall. The camouflaged spaces frame short austere narratives within the subject (and perhaps within the covered objects themselves) that speak in visual metaphor of the desire for transformation - to be something or somewhere other than the known coordinates described in the mythologies of the self. "My mark is not as important as the hidden marks found at the sites themselves. My narrative is more in the process of making the work than in the construction of a narrative or reality within the image." In Nagatani's photographs of the WWII Japanese Internment Camps (1995-96) he has shifted radically away from the ideas of constructed reality and the suspension of disbelief. He felt he needed the personal experience of the camps to fully understand his family history and cultural background. The unmanipulated and almost banal color images create a context for the idea of landscape as a metaphorical vessel that stores human memory and experience. History and the passage of time are conveyed through the marks of wear on its exterior, experience protrudes just below it and cannot be erased. Though at most of the sites the actual structures no longer exist, aspects of individual and collective memory centered at these locations create much more enduring landmarks in the formation of both personal and cultural constructs of Japanese-American identity. The archaeological sites in Nagatani's current work mark a return to the fabricated landscape to include a constructed history placed within a dislocated context of time in a simultaneous past and future tense. Most of the archaeologically exhumed automobiles are of current make and model, suggesting that a possible future has arrived and a possible history is in the process of being documented. Stratified bands of rock and other geological information present another frame of reference for time as occurring beyond the range of human perception, while the seemingly recently abandoned tools suggest a present that will shortly resume its activity. The roles of photographer, informed observer and character actor usually present in all of Nagatani's work have expanded to include archaeologist, historian, and anthropologist who document socio-cultural meaning in the relationships between the various car types and their placement within specific geographical landscapes and burial rituals. A variety of processes including video, digital imaging and traditional photography reflect the various means of recording a documentary image while the fabricated reality they represent calls into to question the veracity commonly attributed to images of this genre. This exhibition provided Patrick Nagatani with the opportunity to display what first seemed to be five somewhat disparate bodies of work together in one space. As the images were selected and placed in a more contextual relationship to one another connections began to appear and unifying themes to coalesce. The connections are not always linear and the transitions are not always smooth, but in an often Technicolor fictional landscape permutations in time, history, mythology and identity constantly reconfigure themselves in a profusion of possible realities.   -Leigh Anne Langwell   Leigh Anne Langwell is an artist and freelance photographer currently residing in Albuquerque, NM.