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Untitled by Catherine Saiki at Door.7. Gallery through June 30. Hanging On Catherine Saiki's paintings question the possibility of closure By Aimee Le Duc Often times we try to define who we are by what we have when it would be far more realistic to define ourselves by what we have left. After births and deaths, marriages and divorces, trauma and ecstasy, we walk through life with the remnants of these experiences hanging on our bodies, coloring our language, and cataloging our memories. The challenge lies not in how to hold on to the past, but how to carry our past with us into our present days. Often times, however, we are forced to shelve our reactions to life in order to move on--in order to find "closure." Instead of looking for this well-worn cliché, we should be looking for a type of fusion in our lives, a way to show off our old scars and new clothes at the same time. Catherine Saiki's paintings are a raw display of what she has left. She has created a body of work, "Closure," that not only exposes the hollow notions of this pop culture catch phrase it gives viewers a chance to do the same for themselves. The exhibit is currently on display at Oakland's Door.7. Gallery, a locally run, one room space fused to the Papa Buzz Café. The gallery is small, non-descript, and receives the full frontal attack of the afternoon sun, but for some reason, it has a calm, reflective tone about it. Catherine's work hangs very well at Door.7. and makes for a solid ground for the daunting tasks of dismantling Saiki's visual colloquialisms and emotional experiences. As a way to comprehend her one-time partner's battle with breast cancer, Saiki started to use her art making practice as a way to confront her grief. In fact, part of the proceeds from the exhibit will benefit Breast Cancer Action. As Catherine began to paint, she would literally suture and stitch canvases bloodied with the colors of scabs and scars in all their stages of development. Her small to medium scale oil paintings are abstract renderings of figures curled in the tender positions of pain and remembrance. They pull together, or rather pull apart, such broad topics as the maddening chaos of the health care industry, the battle scars left by cancer treatments, and the lack of a language to confront these issues. Three of the paintings in the intimately hung "Closure" exhibit are small, square spaces bound and gagged with layers of blackened, stained, or perhaps forgotten bandages covering up potentially anything from our most painful memories to our most devastating accidents. Saiki keenly leaves us standing in front of her work running our own hands up and down our bodies looking to either tear off or tighten the bandages on ourselves. Her coloring is near creepy in its realism. Her imagery is sophisticated enough to be appreciated both for their formal elements and their emotional charge. Saiki exposes the bits and pieces of the figure that is sore to the touch, that never leaves our bodies, and runs far deeper than the trademark closure ever could. When the mood strikes her, Aimee Le Duc is a writing and visual criticism student at CCAC. [ East Bay | Metroactive | Archives ]