“Face With Mask 1, 2 and 3,” Sai Clayton
HĀFU is Sai Clayton’s first solo exhibition, and it takes over the intimate West Nashville gallery space Random Sample with a singular point of view. The exhibition’s title references the Japanese word for “half,” which is used to identify people who are, like Clayton, ethnically half-Japanese. It’s a captivating concept that digs into the dual nature of biracialism, and the liminal space of an identity that’s never just one thing.
The show centers on self-portraiture of various kinds — paintings, embroidered silk, block prints, and even a book screen-printed by Nashville’s own Grand Palace. In the painted self-portraits, Clayton dilutes oil paint to such an extent that the pieces become like watercolor washes. Her monochromatic palette signals that these are more studies than fully realized works in themselves. Clayton washed and dried the raw canvas before she began each painting, emphasizing the textural quality of the surfaces and, possibly, easing up the process of creation — like the writer’s trick of scribbling across a blank page to get through a creative block. Here, Clayton is murdering her darlings, focusing on communicating a message without getting too precious about any of it.
"Face With Mask," Sai Clayton
The faces in the paintings are all Clayton’s own, but each appears distinct due to odd angles or sharp shading — her nose casts a dark shadow across her face in one, her tucked chin and upward gaze give her a Kubrick stare in another. The dissimilarities are intentional, referencing both racial dysmorphia and, according to her artist’s statement, “the multitudes of self as it relates to outward racial perception and inward cultural identification.”
Clayton is great at deconstructing an idea that is both specific to her personal experience and universally relatable. In “Face With Mask 1, 2 and 3,” three 13-by-10-inch works are hung as a triptych, with Clayton’s painted self-portraits layered underneath block prints of masks with exaggerated features, like the ones used in Japanese kabuki theater. On the opposite wall of the gallery are three 48-by-34-inch canvases with painted faces, but instead of being covered with masks, these have embroidered pieces of silk hanging down their middles, bisecting each of them. The silk hangs from thin steel wires that are installed just above the self-portraits, and I’m reminded of everything from shop signage to church banners to protest signs.
In the corner of the gallery is a flowy black silk kimono jacket hanging from a wooden rod. The work, “American American American,” is covered in the Japanese word for “American” embroidered over and over, like a compulsive behavior (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”) or a punitive task (Bart Simpson at the chalkboard). The stitches are tight across one half of the jacket, but around the edges of the left side, the words become more spaced out, drifting apart and eventually disappearing completely — as if the embroiderer gave up, exasperated, halfway through.
