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Tomoko
Sawada continues to work in Kobe
today. She attended Seian University of Art and Design, in Ohtsu,
Japan, completing her degree in media design in 1998 and in photography
in 2000.
Sawada’s
work has always revolved around the exploration of the tension between
outer image and inner truth, using her own body and features as a stage
on which to build different identities. As with her earlier series
ID400 and Costume,
School Days
finds Sawada inserting herself into a different identity. Here the
artist has presented her face in the flat, confrontational idiom of the
institutional group portrait. The portrait has been digitally
manipulated so that each girl in the class is Tomoko Sawada. The
sameness of the faces echoes the rigid uniforms and formal banality of
the rows of students posing for the year book photo. This wall of
conformity shows the effects of institutionalisation on personality and
raises the question: what is the meaning of an individual when all
individuals are identical? Sawada was featured in the
Global Feminisms exhibition curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin.
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