From our friends at Guernica, today we bring you A Changeless Place: Jill J. Tan interviews Jave Yoshimoto. Tan speaks with Yoshimoto, a trained art therapist and practicing artist, about his intricate and brightly rendered gouache depictions of tragedy and disaster. Yoshimoto says, “The news cycle moves so quickly; even if we read about tragedy today, we may forget about it tomorrow. I hope my work is a[…..]

“Memorials are the way people make promises to the future about the past.” Alice Greenwald, director of the National 9/11 Memorial Museum, reminds us that a memorial is as much how we describe who we are now as it is about a prior event. The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina provides an opportunity to look back at a particular moment of disaster, injustice, upheaval, and[…..]

True catastrophes cannot be foreseen… True catastrophes are new information. They are, by definition, surprising adventures.—Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 1985 With the exception of a small community of daredevils, most people try to avoid disasters. There are, of course, various degrees of risk associated with everything we do that drive our precautions as well as the insurance industry. In general, the[…..]