Dug Uyesaka is a central force on the Santa Barbara art scene, and his solo exhibition long story short at Westmont’s Ridley-Tree Museum of Art is a milestone epitomizing the contemporary artist’s response to a sensationalized commercial culture. Known primarily for his work as an assemblage artist with a Rauschenberg-ian approach to subject and material, Uyesaka becomes more free-flowing when he distills his assemblage-driven works onto paper, playing inventively with typography and line.
This Westmont show captures his evolution as an artist and offers a compelling personal storyline, as well. While Uyesaka’s journey to becoming an artist and living in Santa Barbara follows the familiar American path of assimilation, it also reflects the notion of being “othered” in a very tangible way. As part of a Japanese-American family that experienced the trauma and injustice of internment during World War II, Uyesaka bears scars at his roots. The show — which spans more than 40 years of the artist’s career — includes early, openly political works such as “executive order 9066,” which illustrates a personal process of catharsis. Looking more closely, one sees that the majority of his later work responds to the complexities of the past, but due to his highly optimistic nature, this political side of Uyesaka’s “long story” is often less obvious at first glance.
Subculture-influenced typography frames narrative moments throughout the show, and the materials, which are largely happened upon organically or given to him by friends, create a visual feast that lets us see beyond Uyesaka’s signature eye for relativity and design. In the collage “Cover of EYE artist portfolio magazine circa 1980s,” hot-pink graffiti and ink droplets act as imposter poster board for masking-taped snapshots of sexual transgressions. At once eye-catching and racy, the work balances the electric charge of its subject matter with a stroke of irony, as Uyesaka employs a traditional Asian-calligraphy approach to ink the magazine’s title, EYE.