My America, Your America

A woman’s image as a mind-scape, after she had plastic surgery.

The film shows vivid close-ups of a liver with the background music of “My Baby” by Janice Joplin.

This film shows the images of a dancing woman who is wearing Kimono overlapping another image which a naked man is dancing. This is one of the original psychological concepts of C.G. Jung. For women, Animus is an image of a man by projection of her mental energy.

Video began as a medium that inspired discovery. This art documentary traces the expressive roots of “media art” in Japan — works of video, performances, and installations created using video technology that allowed for free and creative visual expression.

At Any Place 1, 1975, film, 16 min, color. Casted over the sky, images of people are suggested as shapes of clouds

One of a series of Idemitsu’s works which deal with housewives buried in everyday life. Idemitsu overlapped a 16 mm work that had Yoneyama Mamako pantomiming in her “Tango of a Hosewife” for the Commemoration of the International Women’s year, 1975. Behind Mamako pantomiming as a housewife, there are clouds, sunsets and bonfires.

A film made using a work of Cindy Sherman, expresses Idemitsu's free and easy sense of humor.

In Idemitsu's experiment using a video camera and monitor, the reflexive exercise looking into a mirror is swapped with the monitor, suggesting a reflection on the history of women's relationship with makeup.

A mindscape in Santa Monica, where Idemitsu lived for 8 years.

Whispering Light, 1985, film, 10:50 min, color In this emblematic personal film, light and shadow of plants is successfully constructed over the subjective gaze of the narrator who is working through her mother’s death.

One man's life is expressed in a form of a mime with a factories' chimneys are placed as its backdrop.

A woman performs domestic chores, watched by a television displaying the image of her own eye. The home is recast as a space of surveillance, control and repetitive labor.

Housewives who find faults in other women that they refuse to admit in themselves, gossiping about them as if it were none of their business. This work visualizes the concept of the 'shadow' as it manifests within everyday occurrences.

As a shadow appears when a human body is lit up, there is a certain dark part like a shadow in the mind of a man. This is an aspect of a man’s personality which he usually is hesitant to admit. C.G.Jung, Swiss psychologist, called this dark aspect a shadow because it appears in personified forms when one dreams. In my work Shadows, there is another monitor in the images of the main monitor. The inside monitor shows the mind of the outside characters, that is, the inside monitor’s characters are shadows, psychological projections of the outside characters. Since the issue of shadows is so complicated and hard to understand, I selected examples that are specific and understandable, as well as familiar to women in their daily life. These are also the feeling I have toward my routine life.

When Yoji announces to his mother that he wants her to meet a new girlfriend, the mother's jealousy destroys the relationship. Yoji's mother fastens onto her son, unable to leave his mother or experience love for any other woman.

Taking place during the women’s liberation movement, Idemitsu filmed the Womanhouse which became her first 16mm film work. Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro jointly organized the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) in 1971. The Cal Arts Feminist Art Program group performed for the audience at Womanhouse in 1972. They transformed an old run-down mansion in Los Angeles into Womanhouse. In the kitchen a progression of sculptured breasts gradually turned into fried eggs; one bathroom contained a mass of Tampax, and if you opened the linen closet you found a trapped mannequin.