BIOGRAPHY
Jen Goya makes video art, experimental oral history documentaries, and interactive media pieces "that more or less inspires delight." Simulations of paradise recur throughout her body of work featuring deadpan representations of famous and imaginary images of Hawaii. Her on-going body of work is inspired by her time selling high-end t-shirts as a teenager in Waikiki. Jen Goya currently lives and works in Honolulu, Hawaii.
*Goya Can is a self-portrait. The can's facade mirrors a certain famous brand of food, replacing it's canned contents with a lesser known vegetable (bitter melon) known as 'goya' in the Okinawan dialect. The packaging and selling of 'Goya-Bitter Melon' acknowledges the unfortunate occupation of Okinawa by the U.S. military for over five decades. The perversion of marketing an exotic vegetable symbolizes the normalcy of colonialism. (3 sec, 2008)