The School of Visual Art and Design’s McMaster Gallery presents its first exhibition of the 2024 – 2025 academic year, The Dog Show: Time Traveler Umeyama’s Drawings from the 21st Century, featuring the imaginative artwork of Hiromi Stringer. More than a collection of charming dog portraits, the exhibition examines how humans have transformed our beloved canine companions over the past two centuries. Learn more about the exhibition here.
Artist: Hiromi Stringer
Exhibition Title: The Dog Show: Time Traveler Umeyama’s Drawings from the 21st Century
Exhibition Dates: August 26 – September 27, 2024
Reception and Gallery Talk: September 27, 5:30 - 7:00 p.m.
Artist's Statement
It was almost 30 years ago, one steamy, hot summer day, when I saw someone walking Siberian Husky dog on a busy street in Bangkok, Thailand. It was when the word globalization started to appear here and there. Why a Siberian anything in Thailand? I want to know about the world I live. I came to this foreign country, the US, when I was in my 30s. A personal paradigm shift including cultural and language differences strengthened my curiosity of wanting to make sense of this place. Mundane quotidian objects of our times surely inform us about our current existence. Both events and “stuff” in our lives have root causes or reasons. My approach is using the mundane as an extension of the broader world.
In this body of work, I chose to use a micro perspective to see my world by borrowing Umeyama’s view. Umeyama is not a hero, rather, he is a mediocre scholar who time-travels to various times and places. His base point is the Japan of 170 years ago. His time was when the country was under governmental enforced national isolation. I see some similarities between one’s process of knowing and living with very limited information about other countries. There are many parallels between him and myself, but he is not my alter ego. I use him to see the world more objectively through his subjective view, yet some traces of my subjectivity are not denied in my works.
Artist Biography
Hiromi Stringer is a US-based Japanese artist. Currently, she is a Senior Lecturer of interdisciplinary, drawing and painting at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Stringer received multiple awards including the 2019-2020 Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship, the 2022 Dedalus Foundation Funds for Past fellows and Awardees, a grand prize for Eyes Got It!2014, the 2019-2020 Blue Star Contemporary Berlin Residency Program/Künstlerhaus Bethanien International Studio Program, Berlin, Germany, the 2021 Summer Arts Faculty Residency program at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency, Saugatuck, MI and the 2024 Vermont Studio Center residency, Johnson, VT. A resident of the San Antonio area, her works are in public, corporate and private collections in Japan and the US.