Esso gallery

Esso gallery where I have been working since last June celebrated 10 years' anniversary last Friday. The owners put up various works of their various artists who had collaborated before. Esso gallery is an Italian gallery. Jennifer, one of the owners, started out the gallery 10 years ago with her friend. She herself was an artist before, having studied as an exchange student in Italy. She told me that she knew nothing about gallery business what so ever (wild!), yet her passion for art made her shift to the one who supported artists. After a year, in her trip to Italy to find Italian artists, she met Filippo. Filippo was from his arty family in Italy and he himself once had his own gallery in Torino. Falling in love with her, he decided to come to NY with her without knowing one word of English (wild2!) That is the brief history of the gallery. What is unique about Esso is reproduction of Italian culture. First of all, it has a great feeling of intimacy with each other (Jennifer and Filippo) and with their artists. They are like a big family, taking care of each other. Secondly, needless to say, Italian language fills with the gallery. Third, they smoke inside of the gallery and like coffee. Now they have stopped smoking since this year, but they are kind enough to let me smoke still. Esso would be the only gallery where you can smoke inside. Then there exists one mystery. The big question mark is “why me working?” I am Japanese who don’t speak Italian at all. (I am still struggling from English!) The only thing that I can say is that I am extremely lucky. I was brought into the gallery thanks to my former great boss, Ombretta. She curated a show, “Atomica,” there. I worked for it and ended up staying up until now. I like their artists as well as artworks that they deal with. You don’t want to work in the gallery where the taste of art is completely different from yours. More importantly, even though I am in the U.S., I am a big fan of European culture anyway. Working Esso allows me to soak into so much about Italian culture. That’s NY. You can expose to so many different cultures. Yes, indeed I am a lucky girl!

Was I growing?

That's how I felt, when I went back to my home in Japan. I felt as if I got taller and bigger. I was not really...then what? Nor did I mentally feel grown up. (That could be a kind of feeling when people who had achieved something in a forighn country came back to hometown.) So, then what what? This is because, in Japan, ceilings are low and everything is smaller than things in the U.S. This simple fact, though, re-assured me that I was away from my home country so long. The things like my bed and room in my house where I spent for many many years and loved looked smaller and detached. I felt alienated and it made me feel sentimental. When I was on the airplane on the way back to NYC feeling a bit sad, I happened to watch a movie, called "In Her Shoes." The movie was about two sisters' struglling for finding themselves. It unexpecetedly touched me, which made me watch two times in row. There was a scene where the younger sister read a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. Interestingly and coincidentaly, it was about losing.

Here is the poem, " One Art."

The more you lose, the more you get used to it.
The art of losing isn't hard to master; 
so many things seem filled with the intent 
to be lost that their loss is no disaster. 

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster 
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. 
The art of losing isn't hard to master. 

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: 
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster. 
 
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or 
next-to-last, of three loved houses went. 
The art of losing isn't hard to master. 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, 
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. 
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. 

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture 
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident 
the art of losing's not too hard to master 
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The poem was for me at that moment. I did not lose my home town, but in a way, I did. This time, in Japan, I did feel that everthing looked familiar but detached. That was the reality, which I created and chose. A little bit bitter feeling was left in my heart. The act of losing is not easy. Always, we lose something whether it is our intention or not. This is life. The phrase that I liked here was; Lose something everyday. Right after I came home in NY, I got rid of the things that I did not need. "Lose something everyday," will be my motto this year.