womens beyond border logo

BOXES beyond borders

Category: Shrine

The Dance of Life

Artist from India

The box represents the oceans and earth, embellished with the symbol Om; this is the sound of our breath or Pranava. Inside, gold dust is the precious earth we must cherish, upon which Natraj, the Lord of Dance, dances the dance of life. On the lid, is Hukam हुकम.

I seek the blessings of the Tibetan prayer flags, the vibrational frequency of Om, and the sheer liberation of Hukum (surrender) to continue this dance with intention and purpose. The Tibetan flags carry our prayers via the wind to get them answered. The flags represent the five elements. White flags symbolize clouds, red for fire, green for water, yellow for earth, and blue for the sky. The mantras spread positive energy wherever they are.

Om- The sacred syllable
Mani- Jewel
Padme- Lotus
Hum- Spirit of enlightenment

Come on Breathe!

Tajima Box Project. An artist and an extraordinary woman collaborate to create a box.

Dolores Huerta, SOCIAL ACTIVIST, LABOR LEADER AND CO-FOUNDER OF UNITED FARM WORKERS

Grace Elizabeth Davis, WRITER, MOTHER AND MARATHON RUNNER

These trophies are awards to the plights that we face as women.

Dolores Huerta wanted to help her students who came to class barefoot and hungry. Through her community work she co-founded the United Farm Workers Union. At 76 years old she continues to lecture and lobby for the UFW, a model used by global labor unions as a testimony to the rights of workers.

Grace Davis, writer/runner/mother, known for “Katrina Relief” brought aid to the hurricane victims of New Orleans, the first to use blogging as a medium in disaster relief.

In our endeavors, our lives can be in danger, our pasts can haunt us, our vulnerabilities can be exposed.

Unselfishly, women strive to be all things to everyone; we endure the odds guided by our passion to care for our world families.

State of Grace

Tajima Box Project. An artist and an extraordinary woman collaborate to create a box.

Grace Elizabeth Davis, WRITER, MOTHER AND MARATHON RUNNER and Terry Acebo Davis, ARTIST

These trophies are awards to the plights that we face as women.

Grace Davis, writer/runner/mother, known for “Katrina Relief” brought aid to the hurricane victims of New Orleans, the first to use blogging as a medium in disaster relief.

In our endeavors, our lives can be in danger, our pasts can haunt us, our vulnerabilities can be exposed.

Unselfishly, women strive to be all things to everyone; we endure the odds guided by our passion to care for our world families.

Dolores Huerta: Social Activist, Labor Leader, and Founder of United Farm Workers

Tajima Box Project. An artist and an extraordinary woman collaborate to create a box.

Dolores Huerta, SOCIAL ACTIVIST, LABOR LEADER AND CO-FOUNDER OF UNITED FARM WORKERS and Terry Acebo Davis, ARTIST

These trophies are awards to the plights that we face as women.

Dolores Huerta wanted to help her students who came to class barefoot and hungry. Through her community work she co-founded the United Farm Workers Union. At 76 years old she continues to lecture and lobby for the UFW, a model used by global labor unions as a testimony to the rights of workers.

In our endeavors, our lives can be in danger, our pasts can haunt us, our vulnerabilities can be exposed.

Unselfishly, women strive to be all things to everyone; we endure the odds guided by our passion to care for our world families.

Being

My box represents the three aspects of being. The lower section shows bones and clay through glass, representing the transient nature of the human body- physical being. On the box itself I drew my doodles and ancient Irish symbols representing the collective unconscious of mental being. Finally, the angel on top represents the spiritual being.

Keeping On Course

Tajima Box Project. An artist and an extraordinary woman collaborate to create a box.

Barbara Boxer, U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA and Barbara Leventhal-Stern

The first words I associate with Senator Barbara Boxer are passion and courage. In my mind, I saw an image of a boat that “keeps on course”.

Because the exhibition serves to inspire young women who could be faced with adversity or hard decisions, I inserted excerpts from our email dialogue so they could read about the sources of her commitment themselves.

Thanks to Senator Boxer, and Michael and Adrienne, her talented staff.

Radical Profiling

Tajima Box Project. An artist and an extraordinary woman collaborate to create a box.

Joan Takayama-Ogawa (artist) and Elaine Tajima (CEO, founder at Tajima Creative)

We live in times of war, where racial profiling threatens the freedom of Arab Americans. By transforming this wooden box into a shrine representing my family’s internment in Japanese American relocation camps, I hope that racial profiling will not happen again.

Symbols of the highest decorated American 442 Regimental Combat Unit, the luggage tags with family numbers for the Takayama and Ogawas, rotate around the box symbolically, tied with barbed wire. Along the perimeter of the black tray, a plant revered by Japanese Americans, connects with barbed wire symbolizing their incarceration. A gold crane perched on a post, represents the Hiroshima bomb.

Thirty-seven last names along the edge of the tray represent hundreds of my family members who were incarcerated during World War II, remembering freedom is fragile, and racial profiling is intolerable.

 

In Memory of My Father

This box turned out to be about the death of my father (1925-1986). In thinking about the exhibition and before I actually had the box in my hands I thought of “hope chests” and “Pandora’s box,” both representing women’s issues and lives. But behind these thoughts was always the image of coffins and bone boxes (the boxes that the bones of the dead in Greece are transferred into after their initial burial).

After receiving the box and playing around with it for awhile, I had to go with the more direct, personal association of my father’s death. So it became a shrine, a memento mori, a symbolic object. The words on top are FUTURE, PLACE, GOOD MAN, LIES. The words inside of the half-open box are HERA, MOTHER, THERAPY, FATHER, DREAM, STRANGER. We will all go to this future place. Here, a good man, lies. Hera, Greek goddess, wife of Zeus, mother/father/therapy, dream, father stranger.

Emerge: Each Holy Remain

This book/box was produced for the 1999 leg of the Women Beyond Borders show.  Its surfaces covered with gesso (support for intricate graphite drawings) and gold leaf, includes a reliquary indicating potential life, death, and  emergence into light. The 52-page book pictures detritus from daily living, preserved by attentive drawing and watercolor: seeds, bones, plant tips, shells, buds, nuts, skeletons.

I know that there are lives much tougher than my own, and that I am enormously privileged to luxuriate in the poignant beauty of the commonplace. I hope that we all sometimes have the opportunity to pause and consider, even in the helpless despair of suffering and the frustrating reality of working so hard so often for our own survival; physical, spiritual, intellectual and emotional, and that of our loved ones, as well as all sentient beings.

The Private Cosmic Library

The “Private-Cosmic Library” probes three possibilities for encoding conscious and public databases along a time axis.

The disk is made of painted cast aluminum, actualizing modern types of codes, encoding information on computerized disks, accumulating familiar signs from the language of electronics within and metaphysical signs in personal-code rhythm language.

The libraries appearing in the brown photographs characterize hundreds of years of book printing, a whole web of cultures and memories open to intimate browsing and learning from generation to generation. The “Private-Cosmic Library” is expressed by the simple fact that these are photographs of the libraries in my home with a portrait assimilated therein and many books in the field of art and metaphysics.

The sculpture-object itself opens as a book closet and alternatively, appears to be a small shrine by virtue of the crystal pyramid and three quartz columns.

In mineral terminology, these types of crystals are used for energy acceleration. According to mythology in the culture of pre-historic Atlantis, all information encoding was carried out energetically upon crystals. In light of the reawakening of the effectiveness of natural crystals, advanced technological achievements are brought closer to the furthest past.

In the cloak of time, past, present and future take place upon a circular axis, and the internal memory is the collective memory. With the hope that despite the physical miniature dimension of the work, the work will expand itself towards the open space.

Welcome to the Forest of Dreams

I have built a place of healing and repose.
Though small enough to fit in your hand,
it is a place to soothe and comfort the weary sojourner.
May you enter and find your peace.

Enter the forest, its cool green breath,
its embracing boughs, its mystery.
Enter the shadows your spirit longs for,
follow the labyrinth.
Enter the heart of the ancient forest,
wander until the dusk surrounds you.
until you find you have come to a place of rest.
Dream until you have found contentment.
Dream until you have found your own way
home, into the light.

Family

This altar is dedicated to my boys, Shawn and Josh, two beautiful people who I cherish. Between the little dots in the photos are images of them surfing in Mexico. The inside of the box and the top of the box have surf “sex wax” melted, hardened and enclosed in resin. The wax will turn to liquid when it gets hot and change its shape when it dries. I like that.

Stone Upon Stone

“Stone upon stone is our house on top of the hill White in sunlit dawn and in the moonlight green And betwixt one night and another, We know nothing but waiting.”

– From July in the City, a collection of poems by Palestinian artist, novelist and poet, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, 1959

In these devastating times of deliberate, pitiless destruction of homes, history and peoples, I defiantly built an edifice of stone to celebrate the future. It is a shrine, a shelter, an obelisk for all those people and countries whose future has been brutally marred and who are denied the chance of generating personal and collective memories. For, as every stone touches another stone, so does memory–it is created by an ageless, unbreakable bond between the past, present and the future.The stones used are ancient Byzantine mosaic cubes collected from near an archeological site in Palestine. The mortar to fix the cubes together is an old Palestinian building recipe.