SZLAVNICS o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2006-01-07 published
SUZUKI,
Aiko
Geraldine
Visual artist, teacher, and avid gardener, Aiko died after a
long battle with cancer on December 31, 2005. Born in Vancouver
in 1937, she was interned during World War 2, along with her
family, in Slocan, British Columbia, and moved to Ontario in
1945. Aiko was a whirlwind of activity-her tremendous energy
and experimentation spawned a great number of beautiful artworks
in a variety of media, and she offered her unrivalled organisational
skills to many different causes. As a teacher and role model,
Aiko touched the lives of countless students in Toronto, through
film animation and art workshops over the course of more than
25 years. Aiko is survived by daughter Chiyoko
SZLAVNICS, brother
David, and sisters Marcia and Dawn. She lives on in the memories
of the many Friends and associates who knew her for her determination
and vivacity, for lessons taught, kindness reciprocated, and
joyful Friendship shared with a wide variety of people. Aiko
was truly a force of nature. A memorial will be held on Saturday,
January 14th at 12 p.m., at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre,
6 Garamond Court, Toronto. Donations can be sent to the Gendai
Gallery Aiko Suzuki Memorial Fund.
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SZLAVNICS o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2006-02-06 published
Force of nature in art world
By Catherine
DUNPHY,
Obituary
Writer
He's the world-renowned geneticist, she was the starving artist,
and yet he worshipped her.
"She was my hero," David
SUZUKI said about his younger sister
Aiko. "She was incredible, she lived the life of environmentalism.
I don't think she ever passed beyond the poverty level of income,
but she was wealthy in community."
Aiko SUZUKI was a fibre artist, who created that haunting pale
hanging that floated throughout the main-floor hub of the Toronto
Reference Library from 1981 until 2004, when it was removed for
cleaning. She was also a sculptor, painter, printmaker, dance-set
designer, curator, teacher.
Her Friends and artistic colleagues always thought of her as
a force of nature -- and that was the phrase they used at her
memorial service on January 14 at the Japanese Canadian Cultural
Centre after
SUZUKI died December 31, at age 68, in her Toronto
home.
The day of the service was also the day of her final show in
the centre's Gendai Gallery, which opened in 2000, six years
after SUZUKI approached many within the Japanese-Canadian community
with an idea of incorporating a gallery within the cultural centre.
Although weakened by her chemotherapy and worsening health,
SUZUKI
spent last summer in a makeshift studio in her garden, working
on a series of pieces taken from the world of nature and from
photographs by her daughter Chiyoko
SZLAVNICS, who is a musician
and composer living in Berlin.
They were smaller than her normal work and deceptively pretty.
"I was shocked, the images were real -- fiddleheads, leaves --
not abstracts,"
SZLAVNICS said. But closer inspection revealed
layering, complexity and depth.
SUZUKI called her show "From The Garden: Stage IV," a reference
to her diagnosis of terminal cancer.
"I think it kept her alive," said her friend, composer Ann
SOUTHAM.
"She probably got grabbed by it."
SUZUKI was a strong, independent woman -- as a single mother
raising a daughter and as an Asian woman in the testosterone-charged
art scene, she had to be. She always organized her own shows.
The reality was she usually didn't have a gallery to represent
her works and for years had to do it herself.
Her last show was no different.
SUZUKI knew she wasn't going to be able to make her own opening.
The day before she died, she told her daughter to call it off,
believing it couldn't happen without her, but
SZLAVNICS told
her mother that this show would go on.
SZLAVNICS saw that her mother was relieved. After all, art is
what she had always lived for.
SUZUKI spent her early childhood in a wartime internment camp
in British Columbia, moving to Leamington and then London, Ontario,
in 1945. Everyone in her family had an English and a Japanese
name. She was Geraldine or Gerry, a high school cheerleader,
beautiful.
David SUZUKI said their Canadian-born father had a "traditional,
screwy attitude" about his daughters completing high school and
then getting married, even as David was in the United States
at university.
But Gerry SUZUKI discovered the world of art when she took a
London Artists' Workshop featuring Greg Curnoe and Tony Urquhart.
In 1958, she moved to Toronto, joined the Toronto Artists' Workshop,
and a year later met Alex
SZLAVNICS, a flamboyant Hungarian immigrant.
Their 1965 marriage didn't last, but it was he who encouraged
SUZUKI to recognize her heritage and use her Japanese name.
Her first solo show two years later at the Pollack Gallery was
criticized for including a soundtrack. Local critic Kay
KRITZWISER
deemed the sound of a heart thumping a "distraction" from abstract
art that was "strong enough to stand on its own," but
SUZUKI's
restless vision never recognized the boundaries separating one
medium from another.
As she moved into fibre art, she also became a set designer,
working with composer
SOUTHAM and choreographer Trish
BEATTY
on many Toronto Dance Theatre productions. Her studio at Yonge
and Bloor Sts. amounted to a fusion of poets, sound performers,
musicians and artists.
"We were all flying by the seat of our pants,"
SOUTHAM said.
"It was tremendous fun and it was impossible to say what it was
all about."
SUZUKI's professional pinnacle may have occurred when architect
Raymond Moriyama chose her to design the fibre sculpture for
his new library building, but it came at a great cost.
She developed rheumatoid arthritis and lived on cortisone shots
and in constant pain. She had "constant" surgery, her daughter
said. Her hands, the tools with which she expressed herself,
were gnarled and misshapen, yet art adviser and consultant Catherine
MINARD remembers watching
SUZUKI at work in her studio and marvelling
at her fluidity and grace.
"Everything I saw was lyrical and had a lot of movement because
of the influence of music on her work,"
MINARD said. "She always
had jazz playing in her studio." In fact, someone who had seen
SUZUKI's painting called Stan Get (z) Blue told the jazz musician
about it. It became the cover of Voyage, Getz's 1986 album.
In 1988, after Japanese Canadians won redress -- money and an
official apology from the federal government for its treatment
of them during World War 2 -- writer Joy Kogawa approached
SUZUKI
about curating a joint exhibit of art by Indian, Inuit and Japanese-Canadian
artists.
"For Aiko, it was the first time she realized the possibilities
of being Japanese Canadian and how empowering that can be," said
filmmaker Midi Onodera.
It was the beginning of
SUZUKI's activism. She produced a directory
of professional Japanese-Canadian artists, served on the board
of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, founded the art gallery
and curated several shows.
SUZUKI supported herself by teaching art at Upper Canada College
and film animation at Harbourfront, and for years worked with
the Inner City Angels organization.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer in the summer of 2002 and
told she had six months to live, but this was a woman who was
already living with pain and she wasn't stopping. She organized
Paper/Stone/Scissors for the Gendai Gallery, installations by
five traditional and five contemporary artists, and in May 2005
she unveiled her own show, "Bombard/Invade/Radiate: Witness at
the A Space Gallery." It explored
SUZUKI's reflections about
the late Susan Sontag's pronouncement of the military characteristics
of fighting cancer.
Everyone assumed it would be her last show. For anyone else it
might have been. But
SUZUKI not only lived for her art, she lived
by her art, and she began work on the garden show that would
open at her memorial.
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