The Everyday Fantastic

The Everyday Fantastic was a major solo exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art, London, 2009. A book was published to coincide with the exhibition: The Everyday Fantastic, with 100 full-colour illustrations and an essay by David Rayson. The exhibition and publication showcased four years of exploratory drawings responding to suburban living: ‘Comfy settees and fringed lampshades; a trip to the local off-licence; bird-watching, of both the human and animal kind. This is the sort of quotidian stuff that makes up David Rayson's depiction of English suburbia, but all of it drawn in bright, heavy, felt-tip inks so that his scenes take on an intense, immediate, disorientating feel, like something from a dream or fever.’ —Gabriel Coxhead, Time Out, January 2009 Research drew from the graphic works of historical artists including Francisco de Goya, George Grosz, Otto Dix and works from the Prinzhorn collection, alongside contemporary artists such as Raymond Pettibon and Mike Diana. The exhibition, book and associated guest lectures celebrated the formal possibilities of storytelling, exploring explicit figuration, surrealistic visions and psychological abstractions. The domestic scale and use of modest materials such as ink-pens echoed the works’ overarching themes of the vernacular and the ‘homegrown’. Reviews: TimeOut, critic’s choice 29th January 2009, The Guardian, Pick of the Week 7th and 14th of February 2009, The Spectator, 31st January 2009, and The Week, 24th January 2009. Lectures: The Everyday Fantastic (Guest Lecture) Slade School of Art (2009), The Everyday Fantastic (Public Inaugural Professorial Lecture) The Royal College of Art (2009), Everyone is here to see the show, (Gallery Lecture) The Rochelle School, London (2009). Everyday Fantastic works in other exhibitions: Peeping Tom, curated by Keith Coventry; The Vegas Gallery, London 2010 and Kunsthal Ka De (Amersfoort), Amsterdam 2011. Nothing in the World but Youth, Turner Contemporary, Margate 2011 (Publication isbn: 978-0955236334

[Review of] Eileen H. Tamura. Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawaii

Eileen Tamura\u27s new book on the first American-born generation of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii is a well-researched and readable study of the period in the early twentieth century, largely between the world wars, when Japanese immigrants to Hawaii realized they were not going to return home and that they would have generational conflicts with their children, entitled to U.S. citizenship as their parents were not until 1952. An outgrowth of Tamura\u27s 1990 dissertation, The Americanization Campaign and the Assimilation of the Nisei in Hawaii, 1920 to 1940,” Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity develops the original topic and works back to the beginning of Japanese immigration to Hawaii, but does not work forward past 1940 to record the monumental changes that occurred in Hawaii. Tamura uses numerous personal interviews she conducted with Nisei and always supports her general statements with anecdotal quotes from the subjects themelves [themselves]. While not an oral history, this study nevertheless employs oral material to document research statistics. As a result, the text comes alive; the reader hears real voices, sometimes in Pidgin English or Hawaii Creole English, but more often the educated voices of the generation caught between two cultures which had much in common (educational goals, puritan work ethic, family and community values) but also much that conflicted (American individualism versus Japanese group consensus, voicing opinions versus keeping a low profile)

Obasan: The Politics of the Japanese-Canadian Internment

Joy Kogawa is a well known Japanese-Canadian poet and novelist. Her award-winning autobiographical novel, Obasan (1981),[1] examines the personal wartime internment experience of the author through the fictionalized persona of Naomi Nakane and her Aunt Emily Kato. Obasan, the title character, is Naomi\u27s other aunt, the one who raises her when World War II destroys the family. Emily is a political activist, the voice of protest and conscience in the novel, while the narrator, Naomi, has to work through her own silence and that of all Japanese-Canadians. As a novel with a dual voice, Obasan is able to probe the politics of the internment experience and its effect on the country as a whole as well as to demonstrate the internal, private damage to these loyal citizens who, as a minority group, kept their suffering quiet and were obedient

[Review of] Asian United Women of California, ed. Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women

Making Waves is an impressive collection of writings that includes poetry, fiction, and autobiography and historical, sociological, and political essays about American women who came from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, and Thailand. This is quite a feat. While non-Asians tend to stereotype Asians and lump them together, their cultures, traditions, and histories are diverse. Making Waves includes stories of Vietnamese boat refugees, Japanese picture brides, World War II camp detainees, Chinese prostitutes and grandmothers with bound feet, Filipinas looking to escape poverty by marrying American men through the Cherry Blossom network, and the list goes on. The personal accounts are compelling. The background essays-on the Asian American women\u27s movement, on Indian marriage advertisements in the United States, on the Asia American women\u27s labor movement, on Asian-Pacific wife battering, on women in politics and the media, on interracial marriages and families, on Asian American lesbians-give us insight into aspects of these cultures that are not well known. Connie Chung and Patsy Mink are national figures, but most of the women profiled in Making Waves have not been recognized

VARD2:a tool for dealing with spelling variation in historical corpora

When applying corpus linguistic techniques to historical corpora, the corpus researcher should be cautious about the results obtained. Corpus annotation techniques such as part of speech tagging, trained for modern languages, are particularly vulnerable to inaccuracy due to vocabulary and grammatical shifts in language over time. Basic corpus retrieval techniques such as frequency profiling and concordancing will also be affected, in addition to the more sophisticated techniques such as keywords, n-grams, clusters and lexical bundles which rely on word frequencies for their calculations. In this paper, we highlight these problems with particular focus on Early Modern English corpora. We also present an overview of the VARD tool, our proposed solution to this problem, which facilitates pre-processing of historical corpus data by inserting modern equivalents alongside historical spelling variants. Recent improvements to the VARD tool include the incorporation of techniques used in modern spell checking software

Doping of Si nanoparticles: the effect of oxidation

The preferred location of boron and phosphorus in oxidized free-standing Si nanoparticles was investigated using a first-principles density functional approach. The calculated formation energies indicate that P should segregate to the silicon core, whereas B is equally stable in the Si and SiO_2 regions. Our models thus suggest that, in contrast with nanocrystals with H-terminated surfaces, the efficiency of phosphorus incorporation in oxidized Si nanoparticles can be improved by thermal annealing

Out of Kuwait

The exhibition was the outcome of a two year project, involving a residency programme designed and delivered by Professor David Rayson with the support of the British Council in Kuwait, and culminated in the UK debut show of 13 emerging Kuwait artists who all work in a direct response to living in Kuwait and their work explores the Kuwait landscape in its broadest and most expansive sense. Through a wide variety of means these artists are excavating Kuwait’s social, economic and cultural identity, along with their own interpersonal relationship to the Kuwait’s very particular history. This exciting young group of Kuwait artists utilise a broad range of traditional and contemporary materials and processes, which reflects their relationship to the historic, the contemporary, and future technologies, which directly informs these artists many modes of working and will be represented and witnessed in the exhibition. As many of the works in the exhibition show, for lots of these young artists it is also the landscape as remembered, the managed and the maintained present, and the projections of the future landscape. This is the culmination of a large group of Kuwait artists working with the British Council, The Royal College of Art and Kuwait’s Contemporary Art Platform through a series of residency seminars and presentations organised by the international curator Alia Farid Abdal a graduate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professor David Rayson, Head of Painting at the Royal College of Art being supported by three MA students from the RCA’s Painting programme. As artists and key cultural figures are beginning to explore the possibilities of figuring the landscape in contemporary terms as a vernacular and politicised space, these artists are at the forefront of a new generation of artists who’s practice is being supported by contemporary research, and will not only have an impact upon the artistic positioning of the emerging art scene emanating from the Middle East, but also the nature of art education within the region. The exhibition includes an illustrated publication with texts by the British Council’s Andrew Glass, Aseel Al Yaqoub one of the artists in the exhibition, and an essay by Professor David Rayson. Artists: Mohammed Al-Kouh, Ahmad Alshammeri, Adel Ashkanani, Thuraya Lynn, Mona Al-Qanai, Nima Algoo, Aziz Alhumaidhi, Zahra Al-Mahdi, Roa AlShaheen, Aseel Al Yaqoub, Amani Althuwaini, Mohammed R.Sharaf, Muneera Alsharha