Credit: Cindy Mochizuki, still from Autumn Strawberry, 2022, dance film.
Cindy Mochizuki: Autumn Strawberry (Dance Film)
Experience this video project that shows performers responding to Mochizuki's previous exhibition of the same name that animated the history of berry farming prior to WWII by Japanese settler families across the Fraser Valley.
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The culmination of a project first initiated at the Gallery in 2019, Autumn Strawberry (Dance Film) is a hybrid multilayered artwork. In the summer of that year, Mochizuki participated in a two-month residency at the Gallery where she researched local archives and interviewed members of Japanese Canadians living in the Lower Mainland. A year later, in the summer of 2021, Surrey Art Gallery presented Mochizuki’s large scale multimedia installation Autumn Strawberry.
During the 2019 exhibition, Mochizuki worked with community members and a team of artist-collaborators to realize a “dance film.” This film combines performances with scenes from the artist’s handmade animations and the installation’s whimsical sculptural elements. Mochizuki, along with choreographer Lisa Mariko Gelley, worked with descendants of Japanese Canadian families who owned farms in the Lower Mainland—including North Surrey (Strawberry Hill), Langley, Haney/Maple Ridge and Mission—before their properties were taken away and family members were displaced to internment camps in the interior of British Columbia and Alberta. Under the direction of Mariko Gelley, these participants enacted gestures derived from Mochizuki’s animations. These recorded sessions of movement draw upon intergenerational memory and embodied storytelling as the performers learned, improvised, and connected once again to the lost stories.
An artist’s book publication based on the Autumn Strawberry project will be published in spring 2023 with essays by Namiko Kunimoto and Cindy Mochizuki and interviews with choreographer Lisa Mariko Gelley and composer Nancy Tam.
About the Artist
Cindy Mochizuki creates multimedia installations, audio fictions, performances, animations, and drawings. Her works explore the manifestation of story and its relationship to site-specificity, invisible histories, archives, and memory work. She has exhibited, performed, and screened her work in Canada, US, Australia, and Japan. Her work has recently been shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Burrard Arts Foundation, Richmond Art Gallery, Frye Art Museum, and Yonago City Museum. Mochizuki was the recipient of the Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award in New Media and Film (2015) and the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts VIVA Award (2020).