ARTIST: Megumi Shauna Arai
SKIRT NO: 02.015
MATERIALS: Wool skirt, digital camera
METHOD: Collaborative, traveling, filming
ARTIST STATEMENT
“You Don’t Have to Take It All On Yourself” (2025) is a new video work by Megumi Shauna Arai. Patchworked together are ten interpretations from the running list of ideas for what to do with the collection of 632 secondhand wool skirts collected by Mae Colburn’s grandma between the 1960s and 1990s.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Megumi Shauna Arai (b. 1989) lives and works in New York City. She is interested in many things, including points of encounter, practices of embodiment, enfolding and unfolding aesthetics, and the material and immaterial as interconnected. She has an interdisciplinary BA in Sociology, Embodiment Studies, Political Science and Mysticism from the CUNY Unique and Individualized Studies Program. She will be an artist in residence at COMMONS/OPPES in Chiba, Japan this fall. Her next solo show opens at KOKI ARTS in Tokyo, Japan in November 2025. Recent exhibitions include Immanent Infinite, Object & Thing (2025); Group Shop Show, Bridget Donahue Gallery (2024); Summer Arrangement: Object & Thing at LongHouse (2023); Object & Thing at Madoo (2022); At The Noyes House: Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM and Object & Thing (2020); Lore: Reimagined, Wing Luke Museum (2018) and Midst, Jacob Lawrence Gallery (2018). Recent residencies include Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library; Headlands Center for the Arts; and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Pedagogical collaborations include Field Meridians, an art-based urban ecology curriculum creating tools for resilience through social practice in Crown Heights, Brooklyn; The Museum of Modern Art public programs; and The Mothership, an eco-feminist art and ecology center in Tangier, Morocco.
