Perception is Reality

Anime, Japan's most popular artistic export, has taken a temporary foothold in the Bryan Center. "Perception is Reality," a showing of works by Priscilla Troy in the Louise Jones Brown Gallery, uses anime cutouts and paper art materials to explore themes of transience, the diminishing Japanese population, feminist issues and national defense. The Brown Gallery, an often bypassed section of the Bryan Center's upper level, hosts a number of shows each year, featuring local and national artists. The student-run Visual Arts Committee, an arm of the Duke University Union, chooses the artists each year, and has been in existence since 1968, originally managing a range of visual arts including film and video. 

The committee's current choice is a striking blend of the modern and the ancient, exploring and commenting on the reconciliation of Japanese cultures. Troy's collaged monotypes blend mass-produced anime, or manga, with handmade paper and calligraphy. DragonBallZ-like figures break through pastel pastoral backgrounds, while in some of the more abstract pieces, the unapologetically two-dimensional, often monochromatic characters seem to conjure their surroundings.  

"Marlboro Man," a high-contrast piece in muted tones, sees a man, line-drawn, smoking from behind swaths of black, white and brown, arranged as if the graphic blocks were emanating from the cigarette. In other pieces, such as "It's Getting Hot In Hererr...," a white cutout vaguely resembling Sailor Moon stands enveloped by swirls of red and black, Japanese calligraphy and anime figures, menacingly visaged, in shades of red. Surrounded by demon-like creatures, she seems to hold them just at bay. 

Troy's work does not celebrate anime, but embraces it as an inextricable thread in modern Japan's cultural fabric. We're sure DukeAnime couldn't be happier.

"Perception is Reality" will be in the Louise Jones Brown Gallery until Sept. 26.