Shattering Ideas of Identity
Dawn Chan
Ever since Edward Said deflated Orientalism, we have stealthily developed a new model for straddling several cultures. In the updated model, we stumble upon fused identities, not by pursuing shared fantasies of Tin-tin adventures, but by following kinks in fate. The Netherlands’ brief allowance of refugees, for example, results in a Vietnamese girl who grew up speaking Dutch. A Swiss bureaucrat approves a grant for a Chinese-American student, who later returns to America with cravings for fondue. When caused by happenstance, rather than a widely held fetish, these identity fusions become highly individualized. To the onlooker, the mishmash may even seem incoherent–cool but incongruous, like a teenager who seems attractive despite her gangly limbs and mismatched proportions.
Jeffrey Sarmiento’s work, in a solo show at the Solomon Fine Arts Gallery in Seattle, addresses this new model of identity formation. During his Fulbright-funded stay in Denmark, the recent RISD graduate created glass sculptures that explore his own "constructed" identity as a Danish-speaking Filipino-American.
In Sketchbook 2, Sarmiento suspends Danish text and textual scribbles within a semi-cylindrical block of glass. Machete Wedding is a glass block encasing Tagalog words that violently point towards a vintage image of an Asian woman. Canonical glass art, such as Dale Chihuly’s work, typically highlights the medium’s interplay with its negative space, using everything from tentacles to female curves. With his minimalist block forms, Sarmiento eschews this tradition, inviting you to see glass above all as encasing, like the amber that preserves a fossilized insect. As such, Sarmiento is worth comparing not only to glass sculptors, but also to text and collage artists. His work is reminiscent of On Kawara’s attempts to suspend experience; it also recalls the elegantly earnest tone of Sophie Calle’s recent photo and text pieces. Most of all, it seems like a updated inversion of Mark Tobey’s text-inspired paintings, which employ the styling of Asian languages to grasp at a Westerner’s self-understanding.
Only in the piece titled Resolution does Sarmiento address his "reverse orientalism" from a different angle: that of the oversized, pixilated, 2-D sensibility of pop art. Resolution is a fusion of 45 pixilated glass disks, which from afar reveal a close-up image of a Caucasian face.
Overall, Sarmiento threatens no violent revolt against the stereotypically kitschy aesthetic of glass art. Indeed, the pieces entitled Transmission-Rings and Transmission-Static are amber and fuchsia–colors perfectly at home among shelves of glass tumblers. Good. If it rebelled too hard against the aesthetic of glass art, Sarmiento’s work might seem to be throwing a tantrum against tradition. Instead, in a more mature subversion, Jeffrey Sarmiento injects his chosen medium with content it has never seen before: an exploration of cultural identity. His work is a gentle nod away from a gentle tradition.
