Manon Wada, Digestion
Deeply rooted in personal and familial histories, Manon Wada’s digestion is a series of video vignettes documenting the artist’s interaction with various symbolic discarded materials inherited from her father. Objects ranging from the suitcase her father immigrated to the United States with, a chair he found and used during his time in Manhattan, a letter from Manon’s paternal grandmother written in Japanese, and a floor plan of a lost family home in San Francisco offer insight into the complex family narratives that Manon reconciles and processes throughout the course of the video.
Loosely correlating to the stages of digestion, the final vignette sees Manon and her father sitting at a table eating take-out sushi with forks, a spot of lightheartedness within a larger body of more somber shorts. In processing her father’s items, Manon retells the story of his life, an act of generational storytelling that intertwines his origins within Manon’s own.
About Manon Wada
Manon Wada is an interdisciplinary artist originally from and currently based in New York City on Canarsie Munsee Lenape land. Her art practice is engaged with relational works at the intersection of sculpture, installation, and video. In tandem, she often works collaboratively and on socially engaged, community based art projects.
In 2009 she completed her BFA at California College of the Arts and in 2019 her MFA at Rhode Island School of Design. Wada has been awarded grants for projects including Visible Voices, HEARTH Community Art Garden Project, and Counternarratives of Herstory Census. She is a member of Asian American Women Artists Association and was involved in an affiliate project called A Place of Her Own.
She has been an artist-in-resident at ComPeung in Doi Saket, Thailand, and at Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, NC. Her work has been exhibited at The Emily Harvey Foundation and Border Project Space in NYC, Penn State University in PA, Sol Koffler Gallery and RISD Museum in Providence, RI, Whitney Center for the Arts in Pittsfield, MA, Rumpueng Community Art Space in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and widely in the Bay Area at venues including SOMArts Cultural Center, International Hotel Manilatown, and Thoreau Center for Sustainability.