Ron Terada
Maiko #1, #2, #3
The three Maikos were included in Ron Terada’s 2008 exhibition, Voight–Kampf, at Catriona Jeffries gallery. More ambitious in size and subject matter, this show with its complex video installation marked a new path for Terada’s work. Voight-Kampf is based on a scene from Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner in which a giant advertising billboard in the midst of a dystopian city of Los Angeles in the future displays a geisha eating candy. Terada used this image as a point of departure to explore issues of racial identity, the nature of photographic representation, and the liminal space between fiction and reality. In each of the three Maiko photographs that accompanied the exhibition, a Caucasian woman poses a Geisha and look directly at the camera. The images reinforce the staged and artificial nature of racial categories and stereotypes, but also speak to the excesses brought about by an accelerated consumer culture.
Ron Terada belongs to a generation of Vancouver-based artists that follows the well-known Vancouver School of photoconceptualists which includes Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, and Ian Wallace. However, Terada’s work is also closely aligned with other conceptual practices like Bruce Nauman’s use of signs, neon lights, and text paintings.