Congratulations to gallery artist Lauren Iida, who was commissioned in 2022/23 to create a 325 square foot, hand-cut paper installation for the new Meta offices in Bellevue, WA. This monumental work in paper and watercolor is inspired by historical images of Japanese Americans from the Densho digital archives and honoring farmers of Japanese descent who used…
Excerpt: “Lauren Iida’s love affair with Cambodia began by accident. In 2008, the Japanese American artist was on her way to Bangkok when political unrest rerouted her flight to Phnom Penh. She immediately felt at home. Soon she began dividing her time between her hometown, Seattle, and various parts of the country — drawn in part, she…
Lauren Iida discusses her art practice and Open Studio Cambodia, the artist collective she founded in 2018, with the Phnom Penh Post. Iida says that she really loves using hand-cut paper as her primary medium because the materials are not complicated or expensive and though it can be time consuming the process itself and the…
Thank you to writer Kiyomi Kishaba for a thoughtful review of Lauren Iida’s solo show, Citizen’s Indefinite Leave, in the Feb 2022 issue of the International Examiner. Read the full article here! “Iida’s main art form is hand-cut paper. Her previous piece Memory Net is a 30-foot long paper intricately cut to resemble a fish net that…
ArtXchange Gallery presents Citizen’s Indefinite Leave, a new series of intricate paper cutaways by Lauren Iida incorporating historical scenes from the unjust incarceration of 126,000 people of Japanese ancestry in the USA during World War II. With the assistance from Seattle-based organization, Densho, Iida was able to dive deeper into her own family’s history and create a narrative…
When gallery artist Lauren Iida’s panel in the temporary art mural at Sound Transit’s Federal Way Extension Link was vandalized, she boldly confronted the racist act with the healing power of art.
ArtXchange Gallery artist Lauren Iida on the PBS “American Portrait” national storytelling project
Thank you to The Stranger art critics for highlighting our dual exhibitions, “Due Belle Voci” by Deborah Kapoor and “32 Aspects of Daily Life” as part of the Seattle Deconstructed Art ! Check out their guide to the Seattle Deconstructed Art Fair.
ArtXchange Gallery is pleased to participate in the new Seattle Deconstructed Art Fair. In an innovative show of collective effort, a group of over 40 Seattle art galleries, nonprofits and art institutions have come together to reconstruct the traditional art fair with a community-led effort.
ArtXchange Gallery is proud to present 32 Aspects of Daily Life, a new series of mixed-media, paper cut-away portraits by Lauren Iida. In this exhibition, Iida pays homage to a series of the same name, created in the 1880s by Japanese woodblock artist, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892). Utilizing watercolor and ink, alongside her distinct paper cut-away technique, Iida depicts female-identifying people that she has connected with during her daily life.