Louise Noguchi
destiny/destination (1994)
4 framed gelatin silver prints with sandblasted lettering
126 x 105 cm each panel; 126 x 432 cm installed dimensions
Oakville Galleries purchase, 1998, with the assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Program, Oakville Galleries Volunteer Association and the Corporation of the Town of Oakville.

In Louise Noguchi’s destiny/destination, the artist tells the story of her parentage through the lenses of fate, social history and geography. The story describes her mother’s visit to a fortune teller, who correctly told her both the place in which she would meet her husband, and predicted the large migration which translated into her parents’ forced migration to Eastern Canada as part of the government’s forced internment and relocation of its Japanese citizens during World War Two. Noguchi's piece approaches the portrait of her mother as a story that evolves over time, a life that is affected by factors of environment and change. In Noguchi’s narrative, the circumstances that eventually led to the place of her birth become complicated by the impact of Canadian politics.

This piece by Noguchi is part of the group exhibition Revealing the Subject.  The exhibition presents works from the permanent collection of Oakville Galleries which challenge the conventions of portraiture.  The works in Revealing the Subject share an interest in investigating the individual and the way we construct our identities in the context of changing times.  destiny/destination extends the traditional notion of the portrait to examine the importance of our wider communities and the places we live, suggesting a less clear-cut concept of the extent to which we write our own sense of self, and the outside forces that shape who we are. In Noguchi’s piece, the line between the intimacy of revealing the artist’s own family history and the broad political perspective are one and the same. The places at which the construction of our own identities are affected by these outside factors not only vary for each of us, but are felt to different extents at different stages of our lives.

Revealing the Subject is currently on tour at Galerie d’art de l’Université de Sherbrooke in Sherbrooke, Quebec from 4 June – 21 August 2005.