STANFORD, Calif. — The 233 masks that originally hung on the exterior of Ruth Asawa’s family home in San Francisco’s Noe Valley are publicly displayed in their entirety for the first time in the ongoing exhibition The Faces of Ruth Asawa at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center. Installed on the reverse side of the wall upon which the Stanford Family Collection death masks are exhibited as part of Mark Dion’s The Melancholy Museum, Asawa’s life masks disentangle the impulse to collect from a culture of mourning — they do not keep count of past or future losses.

Asawa was inspired by a 1966 Life magazine article on Roman busts, and became determined to create imagines, Latin for wax images, of her friends, neighbors, students, and family. She fit cardboard cut-outs over her sitters’ vaselined faces and then applied plaster. Once it was set, she would lift the plaster mold and fill it with clay to create a mask that holds the trace of a moment — a stencil of the real. The instant moments that she captured were what she liked about casting faces. Asawa’s preference for immediacy is echoed in her frustrations about cultural institutions’ fetishization of Japanese internment. She told Paul Karlstrom in an interview, “I didn’t want to be a victim […] Our life as immigrants was much harder than the internment … Just surviving was much more intense.”

Η συνέχεια εδώ.