December in Oahu: A Dream of Victory

About December in Oahu: A Dream of Victory

This contemporary figurative oil painting explores themes of politics and culture.

Deborah Root’s dynamic colourful compositions tell an intimate story about her experience during socially relevant and politically important moments in time.

“Victory suggests parades and euphoria, people dancing in the street, and sailors kissing random strangers. But once the excitement passes and people return to a version of their old lives, the scars of war remain.
What was the nature of “victory” for WW2 veterans and their families? While my father was in the Air Force, my mother's father was on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific and attended the Tokyo Bay surrender in 1945. After the war, he and my grandmother spent a great deal of time in Hawaii (and Japan).
Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War changed my grandfather’s life, and I'm told he returned home a different man. The dream in the title is what, in the minds of some, victory looked like or should look like—a well-earned rest, an essentially white world (as exemplified by the tourist sunbathers), with Hawaiian dancers for entertainment. But for men like my grandfather, the Japanese Zeroes still fly – a reference to my grandfather’s PTSD and the extent to which the Pearl Harbor attack shaped his consciousness.
The tondo form makes it possible to experiment with time and space, and I chose to center my grandparents, elderly now, in the image, with my grandmother looking satisfied and my grandfather slightly less sure, as they enjoy their Hawaiian balcony. These figures are surrounded by fragments and layers, an overturned sky and sea, and sunbathers floating through space.” Deborah Root

Deborah Root is a painter, writer, lecturer and professor. She has written extensively on the relationship between visual arts and cultural politics. Root was born in Seattle and attended university in Canada before settling here.
She acquired both her BA and MA in Archeology and Anthropology at Canadian universities and finally a PH.D. from the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University. Her 1996 book entitled ‘Cannibal Culture’ was included in a 2017 Buzzfeed list (digital media company) of the 16 books to read to understand white supremacy in the United States. She has taught at several Canadian universities and has sat on the boards of a number of Toronto-based art and political magazines. Deborah Root has exhibited her paintings in both solo and group shows in Canada, the U.S. and Europe since 2017.