Junko Yamamoto     Images | Bio

Education:

1999 Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree Cum Laude   Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle WA
1995 AA Degree, Bellevue Community College, Bellevue WA

Selecteed Solo Exhibitions:

2008 Gallery IMA, Seattle WA
2007 Frank Lloyd Wright’s Westcott House, “Wright Now”OH
2006 IT! Gallery, Boise, ID
2006 Gallery Lotus Roots, Osaka Japan
2006 J-Trip Art Gallery, Tokyo Japan
2004 AT. 31, Seattle, WA
2003 AT. 31, Seattle, WA
2002 Art Star Project, Seattle, WA
2000 King County Art Gallery, Seattle, WA
1999 Odeum Gallery, Seattle, WA
1998 Raw Gallery, Seattle, WA

Group Exhibitions:

2008 SAM Gallery 35th Anniversary Celebration, Seattle WA
2007 Introducing - Junko Yamamoto, Gallery IMA, Seattle WA
2007 SAM Gallery " now and then", Seattle, WA
2006 Poncho Invitational Fine Art Auction, Seattle WA
2006 Designers Gallery @ Design Source International "Color/Texture show" , Tualatin OR
2005 Henry Art Gallery "Bashville" Seattle, WA
2004 Gas Art Gallery "Tra Est e Ovest" Torino, Italy
2004 Kirkland Arts Center "Material Witness" Kirkland , WA
2003Seattle Art Museum Rental/Sales Gallery "Grand Opening Gala" Seattle WA
2003 Cornish College of the Arts Alumni Exhibition Seattle WA
2003 Seattle Art Museum Rental Sales Gallery "30th Anniversary Celebration" Seattle WA
2002 Soil Auction, Seattle WA
2003 Poncho Invitational Fine Art Auction "All about Art" , Seattle WA
2002 Bellevue Art Museum Gala Art Auction "Some like it art" Bellevue WA
2001 Art Star Project "It's just like the movies", Seattle WA
2001 Seattle Art Museum Rental/Sales Gallery "Introduction" Seattle WA
2001 Henry Art Gallery "deBASHery", Seattle WA
2000 Bellevue Art Museum Pacific Northwest Annual Juried Exhibition, Brian Wallace Juror Bellevue WA
2000 D'adamo/Hill Gallery Group Exhibition, Seattle WA
2000 Soil Gallery Auction, Seattle WA

Juried Exhibitions

Bellevue Art Museum Pacific Northwest Annual Juried Exhibition, Brian Wallace Juror  Bellevue WA - 2000
Bellevue Art Museum Pacific Northwest Annual Juried Exhibition, John Tupper Juror  Bellevue WA – 1999
Kirkland Art Center 2nd Annual Juried Print Exhibition, Tom Collins, Juror the Associate Curator of U.W. Henry Art  Gallery
Kirkland WA – 1999
Kirkland Art Center 1st Annual Juried Print Exhibition, Sam Davidson Juror from Davidson Gallery Kirkland WA - 1998

Awards/Grants

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Westcott House, “Wright Now”OH - 2007
Cornish College of the Arts Merit Scholarship - 1998-99
Cornish College of the Arts Faculty Select Exhibition, 2nd Place – 1998

Related Art Experience/Lecture/Teaching

Dayton Art Institute  / Lecture Dayton Ohio 2007          
Youmaga.com / Art columnist Seattle, WA 2005-2006          
Seattle Asian Art Museum Youth and family Program / teaching Seattle, WA 2004          
Seattle Asian Art Museum Youth and family Program / teaching Seattle, WA 2003

Reviews

"The flickering quality of the asbtract painting is captured and made more explicit in the video, it's jumpy images echoing her brushwork." by Matthew Kangas, Art in America, Nov issue, 2008

"With her deft brushwork, and oscillating color-grounds of greens, blues and browns, Yamamoto employs the brighter colors as almost industrial contrasts. The dialogue between the pop culture references and formal elements that is simmering below the surface of these small, glowing works also might emerge more explicitly with great potential rewards." by Mathew Kangas, Art Ltd. Magazine, Nov issue, 2007

"Yamamoto applies and gouges away with a joyful, intoxicting inventiveness." by David Stoesz, Seattle Weekly, Sep. 15-21, 2004      

"airly abstractions of big ideas." The Stranger, Vol 13, Jan.8-14,2004        

"They are dream like, but also focused toward some goal, however obscure." by David Stoesz,Seattle Weeky, Sep. 18-24,2002      

"Junko Yamamoto paints gorgeously weathered abstractions in warm cool colors enlivened by the occasional pink pillow shape."
Seattle Weekly, Sep.25-Oct.1,2002         

"Junko Yamamoto's landscapes are weightless,drifting worlds." by Regine Hackett, Seattle Post-Intelligrncer, July.11,2000      

"emanating from nothing, and always empty:wordless thoughts without thinking." King County Art Gallery Web Site,  March.2-31,2000     

"find a different way to stamp  their abstractions with a Post-pop sensibility." by Regina Hackett, Seattle Post-Intelligencer,June,1998

Publications/Catalogs

Poncho Invitation Fine Art Auction  2008
Art Ltd, Magazine, Nov issue, 2007        
Poncho Invitation Fine Art Auction  2007        
The Wall Street Journal Aug 18th 2006       
”Maximarism” Art at Hotel Max, Seattle WA 2005        
Condé Nast TRAVELER America Issue , February 2006, page38        
Poncho Invitation Fine Art Auction  2006        
Southwest airlines  Spirit Magazine December 2005 Page35        
Gas Art Gallery, Gagliardi Art System 'Tra Est e Ovest' , Torino, Italy – 2004   
Poncho Invitation Fine Art Auction "All About Art" 2003         
Cornish College of the Arts 2003 " Creating, Inspiring, Transforming" Catalogs

Public & Private Art Collections

Green Festival/ Food Court Manager  Seattle, WA 2008                
Ravishing Radish Catering/ Floral Designer & Event Manager 2004-2008         
Sustainable Ballard Eat Local Now/ Volunteer Seattle, WA  2008        
Sustainable Ballard Eat Local Now/ Volunteer Seattle, WA  2007        
BiddyBEAT Magazine / director of Photography Seattle, WA 2001        
Plymedia / photo editor Seattle, WA 2000-2001         
Katsushige Nakahashi  “zero Project” / Photographer Seattle, WA 2001        
Degenerate Art ensemble / Photographer & costume designer Seattle, WA 1995-2000        
5th Ave. Glass Blowing Studio / Assistant Glass Blower Seattle, WA 1995

Artist Statement:

My recent work is part of an ongoing series loosely organized through my meditations on the notion of shunyata, the Sanskrit word for “emptiness.”  My pieces estrange the concept from its common Buddhist associations in order to explore the perpetually irreducible tensions between emptiness and fullness in terms of the forms and apparent borders of human consciousness.   We can only imagine the emptiness expressed by shunyata in relation to an attendant conception of fullness or wholeness—an elementary insight that serves as a starting point for me as I seek to puzzle through the boundaries of consciousness, knowledge, memory and our sense of delimited self-possession (as against understandings of a universal or whole consciousness). 

My process, which typically involves vacillating between painting layers of color and shapes on canvas and using rollers to create the inherently imprecise and suggestive vertical lines which texture most of my work, is consonant for me with our constant “push and pull” of material and conceptual space and the nearly-indistinguishable layering of our conscious experience.  Such layering is further suggested by the use of a range of pastels drawn from the patterns of clothing traditionally worn under more brightly colored kimonos—colors which were inscribed in my thinking from a young age. 

The circular forms that (re)appear and disappear in all of the pieces signal for me both the thresholds of consciousness and interconnectedness my creations attempt to inhabit as well as my indebtedness to the forms of Japanese popular culture—particularly comic books—with which I grew up.  The comic book trope of dialogue bubbles invoke our primary communicative gestures and the ways in which repertoires of pop cultural imagery help to shape and structure our most basic expressions of consciousness, even as we recognize in them an attempt to escape the “reality” of the rest of our conscious lives.  The perpetual openness of these bubbles invites a kind of play, a precarious undecidability and possibility that marks all of our ways of knowing and communicating.