Art Review // Edgar Orlaineta: History is taking flight and passes forever
Midcentury Modern and the wartime internment of Japanese Americans at Mexico City's Proyectos Monclova
‘History is taking flight and passes forever,’ wrote Isamu Noguchi from the Poston War Relocation Center internment camp in Arizona in a letter to Man Ray, expressing his frustrations at the US policy towards Japanese Americans during the Second World War.
In his exhibition titled after the famed designer’s lamentation, Edgar Orlaineta presents new sculptural works and an installation that considers the political and artistic legacies of Japanese-American icons of mid-century art and design who had been interred in concentration camps in the US, a history that was something of a suppressed anathema in contemporary American consciousness and is now being invoked into broad awareness by Donald Trump’s proposals.
Image credit: Edgar Orlaineta, detail from History is Taking Flight and Passes Forever (2015) Courtesy the artist and Proyectos Monclova
