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Member Monday
As is the case with ink, clay, lacquer, and silk, bamboo is a material found naturally in Japan but many of the ways of working with it came from abroad. Yet, over the centuries, Japanese artists and artisans developed these materials into forms of art that are not only distinctively Japanese but are among the finest of their kind in the world. Margo Thoma, Director of TAI Modern and one of the foremost dealers in this field, is devoted to introducing and attracting as many people as possible to the wonderful world of Japanese bamboo art. Thoma has a long-established… MORE >
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At Casa Loewe Barcelona, Fashion Finds a Home With Contemporary Art and Catalan Craft
For Casa Loewe Barcelona, Jonathan Anderson commissioned a site-specific installation from Japanese bamboo artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV. It opens to a patio displaying a sculpture by South African ceramicist Zizipho Poswa. Osaka-born artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV works with torachiku, a striped “tiger bamboo” that only grows in one valley of Kōchi Prefecture, in the south of Japan’s Shikoku island. Following in the footsteps of three generations of bamboo craftsmen, he weaves strips of it into sculptures held together by sheer tensile strength to realize monumental works that have been collected by the British Museum and the Met—and, most recently, by Loewe. “I… MORE >
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Yufu Shohaku at TAI Modern
YUFU SHOHAKU, Shining Dragon (2021), madake bamboo, bamboo branches Facebook Twitter Email Save Tai Modern, 1601 Paseo de Peralta, 505-984-1387, taimodern.com Second-generation bamboo artist Yufu Shohaku was born in the Japanese city of Beppu and learned bamboo basket making from his father, Yufu Chikuryu. Shohaku, who mastered the craft by the time he was in middle school, is known for his rough-plaited baskets that blend plant roots and bamboo chunks, following in the tradition of older Beppu artists. A certified master at flower arranging and the head of a local Shigin (chanted poetry) group, Shohaku constructs his sculptural and functional baskets with certain types of… MORE >
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Fascination with ravens features prominently in works by Ramona Sakiestewa
Ravens soar, nest and forage all around us. In the morning, they fly to the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, then head back toward town, where they drink, bathe and preen while croaking and cawing at each other. Ramona Sakiestewa was fascinated by the ravens flocking in her Santa Fe yard. Her insights produced the series of monoprints “Raven @ the Big Bang,” on view at Tai Modern from Aug. 13-30. “They’re very entertaining,” she said. “They’re loud and I have a little pond in the back and they bathe and bring their young to the pond the… MORE >
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A basket artist ‘on the leading edge’
The Japanese artist Isohi Setsuko used to hate her given name because it sounded old-fashioned. “I believe it was my destiny to become a bamboo artist,” Setsuko stated. Santa Fe’s TAI Modern will showcase that magic with fiber and fingers in a solo exhibition of Setsuko’s work through Aug. 28. The artist’s work appeared in a TAI show of women basket-makers in 2010; the current show marks her first solo exhibition here. Gallery owner Margo Thoma discovered Setsuko’s work through the Japanese Traditional Craft Arts Exhibition. At the time Setusko started, it was unusual for a woman to pursue… MORE >
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SFR Picks—Week of July 21
Courtesy TAI Modern Original article Weave Me Like You Do Last chance to check out TAI Modern’s exhibition of a bamboo art master “We’d worked with [bamboo sculptor Torii Ippo] for so long, it surprised us we never had a show directly for him, so this is a retrospective,” Margo Thoma, director of TAI Modern, tells SFR. “Even though he passed away in 2011, this is his first solo show in the United States.” In case you didn’t know, that’s kind of a big deal. Originally, Ippo began working with bamboo to support his family following his father’s death, but… MORE >
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New mural goes up on Girard Avenue in La Jolla: Can you spot the Berlin connection?
‘Paintings are People Too’ by Monique van Genderen was installed in January 2020 at 7661 Girard Ave. in La Jolla, as part of the ongoing ‘Murals of La Jolla public-art series. (Photo by Elisabeth Frausto) By ELISABETH FRAUSTO JAN. 22, 2020 Original article “Paintings are People Too” is the latest mural curated and installed by the Murals of La Jolla program. The large-scale, vibrant print of paintings floated against a photograph of a Berlin street hangs at 7661 Girard Ave., created by artist and UC San Diego professor Monique van Genderen while she was living in Germany. “My mural is about… MORE >
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Rescued from oblivion
Bamboo weaving is a fringe art in its native Japan. Today, contemporary bamboo artists are weaving pieces specifically for Western markets. The Santa Fe Gallery TAI Modern discovered this languishing art form in 1997, and has displayed and promoted the delicate baskets ever since. Owner/director Margo Thoma bought the gallery when the original owners retired in 2014. “I can’t take credit for the gallery finding this art form,” she said. “My initial interest has been I had never seen anything like it and the thought of this disappearing made me sad. Once I began going to Japan and meeting the… MORE >
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Women Artists of the Southwest
Understanding the value of museum spaces, specifically for the people who use them, is of vital importance to artist and designer Ramona Sakiestewa. The artist has extensive experience in architectural design (a discipline responsible for the parts of architecture that are not the building, but are contained by it), specifically for cultural institutions. Her projects range from the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall, as well as the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, to the Tempe Performing Arts Center in Arizona. While Sakiestewa also works as a textile artist, printmaker, and painter, she says she… MORE >
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Art in the Home: Stunning Sculptures
Art lovers and collectors looking to make a statement and shake up the dynamic of their home design often consider expanding their personal collections to incorporate fine sculptures from contemporary artists. Yet bringing sculpture into the home brings untold challenges, and the medium presents logistical hurdles not typically associated with conventional paintings and the like. “Sculpture is always the most challenging when acquiring art. Two-dimensional work is easier to send images and visually understand. Three-dimensional pieces almost always need to be seen in person to understand scale, dimension and visual effect,” explained Los Angeles-based interior designer Jamie Bush. “Sometimes we… MORE >
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Finding the Right Contemporary Artists for Your Home Collection
From curious types and those mildly interested in sprucing up their walls to lifelong art lovers looking to realize their personal vision of a finely curated, art-filled residence, finding the right artwork for one’s home can be quite the challenge. Traditionally, when it comes to incorporating fine art into interior design, most homeowners start with the most conventional of all art forms, paintings. But even once the medium is settled on, how does one go about finding the right painting, or artist, for their home? Some merely keep an eye out for whatever strikes their fancy, while others enlist the… MORE >
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Eye-Catching New Kinder Building Gives MFAH (and Houston) Extra Art Power — Get a First Look
Installation view of Jason Salavon’s Little Infinity, 2020. (Photo by Richard Barnes, Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston opens the 237,000-square-foot Nancy and Rich Kinder Building on Saturday. (Photo by Richard Barnes, Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will celebrate a milestone this weekend with the opening on Saturday of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, a salute to the museum’s modern and contemporary collections, an addition that designates the city’s cultural landmark, measuring 14 acres, as the fourth largest museum campus in the… MORE >
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WEEKEND ARTS ROUNDUP
How can you get your cultural fix when many arts institutions remain closed? Our writers offer suggestions for what to listen to, read and watch. Original article ART Asia Week’s Virtual ‘Redux’ “The Hundred Poems [By the Hundred Poets] as Told by the Nurse: Fujiwara no Yoshitaka” by Katsushika Hokusai. The 19th-century woodblock print is on view at Asia Week’s website.Credit…Scholten Japanese Art This year’s edition of Asia Week, the annual convergence of auctions, museum shows and private dealer exhibitions that provides a tour of the artistry of several ancient cultures, was mostly forging ahead despite the coronavirus. But that plan didn’t… MORE >
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Honda Syoryu at TAI Modern Michael Abatemarco Jul 17, 2020 Original article Facebook Twitter Email Save TAI Modern, 1601 Paseo de Peralta, 505-984-1387, taimodern.com The skill of Japanese bamboo art extends from traditional basketry and functional objects to contemporary sculpture. Some, like Honda Syoryu, are skilled in both. Encouraged by Tai gallery founder Robert Coffland, the artist embraced an aesthetic that includes elegant and fluid abstract forms. His work is included in a group exhibition of 15 Japanese bamboo artists. Represented artists include members of historic family lineages and contemporary bamboo masters, such as Yamaguchi Ryuun, Honma Hideaki, and Fujinuma… MORE >
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NM Art from Anywhere: Ramona Sakiestewa at TAI Modern
Original post Ramona Sakiestewa grew up in the American Southwest where the land and sky informed her artwork. Over 30 years ago her artwork began in tapestry weaving. In 2009, Ramona began focusing on constructed works on paper as a new medium. Using printing, painting, and drawing, the artist layers shapes, colors and textures to form a dimensional lexicon for the constructions. Her new work can be seen at www.ramonasakiestewa.com and at www.taimodern.com.
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Beneath the surface: Watanabe Chiaki’s “Calm Mind”
View original article Calm Mind (2016), madake bamboo, rattan As rough and choppy as the waves might be on the surface of the ocean, when you sink into its depths, there’s a stillness. The human mind, when thoughts, concerns, worries, and fears, are stripped away, likewise becomes still. That was the sentiment that Japanese bamboo artist Watanabe Chiaki sought to convey when he made Calm Mind (2016). “Calm Mind is like a brush painting in three- dimensional form, a single stroke depiction of being deep down in the ocean and having a calmness in your heart and a positive mind, regardless of… MORE >
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The Secret Life of Lance Letscher
The Secret Life of Lance Letscher is a deeply personal and psychological portrait of internationally known, and Austin based, collage artist Lance Letscher. Told through memories of trauma and triumph, the film provides a doorway into Letscher’s profound insights on creativity, the subconscious, work ethic and spirituality. Through his intricate artistic process, we witness the artist’s unwavering determination to stay in the moment—free of mind, thought and preconception. Featuring detailed images of more than a hundred of his collages, sculptures, and installations, viewers are offered a visual feast while gaining intimate access into Letscher’s methodical techniques and brilliant mind.
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‘Making Is About Our Survival’: Exhibition Celebrates Artwork Of Native Women
One thousand years of Native American women’s art is currently traveling around the country, being featured at major museums. “The whole idea to wipe us off the face of the Earth didn’t work,” says Anita Fields, an Osage artist in the show. “So we’re still very powerfully here.” “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists” is now on view at Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., just across the street from the White House. It’s the third stop on a tour that also includes Minnesota, Tennessee and Oklahoma. Jamie Okuma (Luiseño/Shoshone–Bannock), Adaptation II, 2012, shoes designed by Christian Louboutin, leather, glass beads,… MORE >
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Asia Week New York Will Present a Week of Expert Gallery Talks
NEW YORK, New York March 10, 2020 Original article Ancestor figure, adu zatua, Nias 19th to early 20th century Thomas Murray In their on-going effort to educate the public about the many fascinating aspects of Asian art, the dealers of Asia Week New York– have scheduled informative gallery talks–free and open to the public–which coincide with their exhibitions during the week. As space is limited and admission is on a first come, first- served basis, an RSVP to the gallery is required. Visit www.asiaweekny.com for further information. The schedule is as follows: Thursday, March 12 11:00 a.m. A director-led tour… MORE >
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This Artwork Changed My Life: Graciela Iturbide’s “Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas”
Graciela Iturbide Señora de las Iguanas, Juchitán, 1979 Etherton Gallery Eva Recinos Feb 18, 2020 Original Article Elephant and Artsy have come together to present This Artwork Changed My Life, a creative collaboration that shares the stories of life-changing encounters with art. A new piece will be published every two weeks on both Elephant and Artsy. Together, our publications want to celebrate the personal and transformative power of art. Graciela Iturbide spent around 10 years photographing Juchitán de Zaragoza, a small town in Oaxaca. Juchitán is often referred to as a matriarchy—primarily because women control its economy—and Iturbide’s friend, the artist Francisco Toledo, had asked her… MORE >
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Asia Week New York Steps into the New Decade
New York: For the past 10 years, Asia Week New York has presented an abundance of magnificent treasures from every part of the Far East for the pleasure and enjoyment of Asian art aficionados. These exceptional works of art are to be found at many gallery exhibitions curated by prominent Asian art experts that are open to the public on March 12 to 19 (*and in some instances, until March 21). Joining in the excitement are six top-tier auction houses–Bonhams, Christie’s, Doyle, Heritage Auctions, Sotheby’s and iGavel–plus numerous world-class museums and cultural institutions. Says Asia Week New York chairwoman… MORE >
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Bamboo crafts: Woven into Japan’s art history
Left to right: Chikuunsai Tanabe IV’s “GATE” (2019) and Kenichi Nagakura’s “Flower Basket, ‘Woman (A Person)'” (2018) | © T. MINAMOTO; THE ABBEY COLLECTION, PROMISED GIFT OF DIANE AND ARTHUR ABBEY TO THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART. IMAGE © THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART SHARE The Abbey Collection of bamboo arts and crafts, the 20-year loving labor of New York collectors Dianne and Arthur Abbey, attracted 470,000 visitors when it showed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2017-18. A traveling exhibition of some 75 pieces, which is now making a stop at The Museum of Oriental Ceramics,… MORE >
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Best of 2019: Our Top 20 United States Art Shows
Tanabe Chikuunsai IV, “Connection: Origin” (2017), by. Installation at Pierre Marie Giraud Gallery, Brussels, Belgium (photograph by Tadayuki Minamoto, courtesy Tanabe Chikuunsai IV) December 12, 2019 Original article Our favorite US shows of 2019, brought to you by the writers and editors of Hyperallergic. … Honorable Mentions Tanabe Chikuunsai IV: Connection at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA May 31–August 25The fourth generation in a family of bamboo artists, Tanabe Chikuunsai IV makes traditional Japanese baskets like his father and grandfather did, but he also makes huge, soaring works out of bamboo, cleaning and recycling the pieces for… MORE >
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Ramona Sakiestewa
A TASTE OF LIFE IN NEW MEXICO WINE & CHILE Story by Daniel Gibson Photos courtesy of Ramona Sakiestewa Original article published September 2019 The word creativity defines artist During a recent interview in her airy, contemporary studio in Santa Fe, Sakiestewa seems surprised at the suggestion that she is perhaps the most versatile of all Native American artists working in the United States. Decisive, willing to take huge chances, yet also very deliberate, methodical and modest, she responds, “I used to worry about ‘staying in my lane’ because most artists work in a single discipline, but I like trying… MORE >
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Kengo Kuma and Associates’ OMM throws open its doors in Turkey
Kengo Kuma’s stacked timber structure for the OMM museum in Turkey opens to the public this September. Photography: NAARO Original article Since Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim docked on the Spanish shores of Bilbao 22 years ago, cities across the world have tried to emulate its success, attempting to cash in on the ‘Bilbao effect’. For some, this endeavour didn’t yield the desired results: Santiago Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences and Opera House almost bankrupted Valencia, while it could be argued that the Centre Pompidou-Metz, France designed by Shigeru Ban and Will Alsop’s The Public in West Bromwich, England have fallen well short of… MORE >
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Ramona Sakiestewa
AUGUST 29, 2019 ART AND ARTISANS, WINE AND CHILE FIESTA (Story by Daniel Gibson / Photographs courtesy of Ramona Sakiestewa) The word creativity defines artist Ramona Sakiestewa. During a recent interview in her airy, contemporary studio in Santa Fe, Sakiestewa seems surprised at the suggestion that she is perhaps the most versatile of all Native American artists working in the United States. Decisive, willing to take huge chances, yet also very deliberate, methodical and modest, she responds, “I used to worry about ‘staying in my lane’ because most artists work in a single discipline, but I like trying everything.” Indeed, the creative fires… MORE >
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Master of bamboo clouds: Artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV
Michael Abatemarco August 9, 2019 Original article Tanabe Chikuunsai IV, site-specific installation at Tai Modern, photo Gary Mankus Tanabe Chikuunsai IV at work, photo Incredible Films Facebook Twitter Email The snaking, tubular form, made entirely of bamboo, extends from a point on the wall and curves downward to the floor. Wrapped around itself, the form rises again from the floor to a termination point on the same wall. There, thin strips of the bamboo splay out against it like a flattened basket, as though it were merging with the wall itself. On this day in late July, bamboo artist Tanabe… MORE >
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Natasha Nargis Speaks with International Bamboo Artist from TAI Modern Exhibition
By TOM TROWBRIDGE CREDIT TAI MODERN GALLERY KSFR Fashion Commentator Natasha Nargis speaks with International Bamboo Artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV about his exhibit along with other artists at Santa Fe’s TAI Modern Gallery. For more information, see link below: https://taimodern.com/ Listen Share Tweet Email
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The joy of big bamboo—and lots of it
‘Connection’ 2017, by Tanabe Chikuunsai IV at the Asian Art Museum Tanabe Chikuunsai IV’s large-scale installation at the Asian Art Museum evokes the immersive feel of a forest journey. BY EMILY WILSON AUGUST 5, 2019 Original article ART LOOKS Tanabe Chikuunsai IV has been surrounded by bamboo since he was born. A fourth generation Japanese bamboo artist, he studied at sculpture at Tokyo University of the Arts and learned technique from his father and grandfather. Chikuunsai usually produces small sculptural work and traditional flower baskets—but for several years, he’s been fashioning large-scale installations at places including New York’s Metropolitan Museum and the Musée… MORE >
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Santa Fe Art: Southwest Spice Blend
Original article If you don’t like art, don’t go to Santa Fe. You can’t avoid it, and that’s how the locals want it. It’s impossible to live among landscapes that practically scream, “Paint me!” without succumbing to the pull of gallery walks, museum exhibitions, studio demonstrations, art fairs, and more. The summer art scene in Santa Fe knows no bounds, spilling over into every aspect of city life, and that’s how it should be. In May, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (217 Johnson Street) chose Cody Hartley as its fourth director, elevating him from the position of acting director. While he… MORE >
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Art review: Jason Salavon generates art with algorithms
Original article Artist Jason Salavon interacts with his “faceOff (v. Inman),” a work that incorporates real-time video, a webcam, custom software, a large-format monitor and a workstation to create changing “deep fake” images that blend a viewer’s image with those of celebrities and animals. It’s part of his show “Little Infinities,” up through June 29 at Photo: Molly Glentzer / Houston Chronicle Artist Jason Salavon interacts with his “faceOff (v. Inman),” a work that incorporates real-time video, a webcam, custom software, a large-format monitor and a workstation to create changing “deep fake” images that blend a viewer’s image with… MORE >
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SFWEEKLY
By Jonathan Curiel Published Wed Jun 12th, 2019 4:26pm Original article at sfweekly.com Tanabe Chikuunsai IV, Connection. Photo by Jonathan Curiel. A woman with a camera, dressed in dark clothing, walked into Tanabe Chikuunsai IV’s art exhibit the other day, and here’s what she said, loud enough for everyone in the gallery to hear: “Oh, my God.” That sort of effusive utterance is often reserved for, say, news of great importance (“Trump did what? Oh, my God”) or great educational triumph (“He got into Harvard? Oh, my God”). But on an early Saturday morning at the Asian Art Museum, the… MORE >
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SLIDE INTO DECAY: Erik Benson’s Urban Ghost Towns
Share There are indeed ghost towns, despite the well-known edict by Daniel Burnham. Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing. While there remain among us visionary architects who dream grandly of Ozymandian permanence, real estate developers—the architect’s less stylish but more popular twin—are known less for their high ideals than for economic pragmatism and business opportunity. This… MORE >
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Bart Exposito
Symmetry & Shadow, 2004. Original article at ArtForum.com PARKER JONES 8545 Washington Blvd. January 8 – February 26 Bart Exposito’s slyly engaging hard-edged abstractions simultaneously evoke the muted interior design palettes of the ‘70s, the Neo-Geo slickness of the ‘80s, and the vector-based graphic design familiar from electronic music album covers of the mid-to-late ‘90s. Four works on paper, all set against white grounds, look like smoothed-out versions of Joanne Greenbaum’s awkward yet graceful paintings, but unfortunately lose some of her human touch in the process. The five paintings are stronger. In a departure from his earlier works, the forms here… MORE >
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Where to find Japan’s master bamboo weavers
Original article at Blue Wings The island of Kyushu is home to one of Japan’s last remaining bamboo weaving communities where craftsmen and craftswomen transform giant grass into beautiful accessories and homeware. The city of Beppu on the east coast of Oita Prefecture is well known throughout Japan, but it means different things to different people. To hot spring enthusiasts, it’s the home of dozens of onsen, whereas for connoisseurs of traditional crafts, the name “Beppu” is synonymous with woven bamboo products of the highest quality. And though it might not be readily apparent, there’s a connection between Beppu’s baths… MORE >
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Japanese Bamboo Art From New York: The Abbey Collection
Shoryu Honda‘s “Dance” (2000) | THE ABBEY COLLECTION, “PROMISED GIFT OF DIANE AND ARTHUR ABBEY TO THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART,” IMAGE ©THE MET OITA PREFECTURAL ART MUSEUM May 18-June 30 BY YUKARI TANAKA MAY 7, 2019 Original article at Japan Times This traveling exhibition, which first showcased at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2017, brings to Oita a selection of Japanese bamboo objets d’art originally amassed by collectors Diane and Arthur Abbey. The show of 75 works by 44 artists includes masterpieces by six living national treasures. Pieces range from Meiji Era (1868-1912) traditional… MORE >
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Recycled Bamboo Installations Intertwine in Site-Specific Configurations by Tanabe Chikuunsai IV
JUNE 14, 2018 Original Article At Colossal By KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI Photo © Éric Sander Japanese artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV produces twisting installations of woven bamboo that meld into their environment’s floor and ceiling. To bend the durable material he first moistens each piece to achieve the perfect curve, and often recycles the same pieces of bamboo for future installations. In 2017 the artist constructed a site-specific piece titled The Gate at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work used tiger bamboo that had been used ten times, including in a piece shown at the Museé Guimet in Paris. “Technique and skill and spirit are important,” Chikuunsai IV… MORE >
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An Empire of Bamboo in the Home of Collectors
Diane and Arthur Abbey’s apartment contains a mix of modern art and Japanese baskets. On wall, clockwise from top left, “Spritze” (1924), Wassily Kandinsky; “Woman-Torso” (1965-66), Willem de Kooning; and “Moonlight Landscape” (1914), Man Ray. On left table, from left: “Fuki or Noble Wealth” (1940), Tanabe Chikuunsai II; bamboo basket for tea ceremony articles (2007), Watanabe Shochikusai II; and “Flower Basket” (after 1946), Suemura Shobun. Credit Wassily Kandinsky, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Man Ray 2015 Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Rene Lalique, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New… MORE >
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Flowers Cover Everything at the Stephen L. Clark Gallery
Cactus Flower by Lance Letscher Original article at Austin Chronicle.com 1. This review is a collage, let’s say, although of course we’re considering it textually rather than texturally, building it up from words instead of images. 2. Lance Letscher runs his X-Acto blade along the outlines of a lithograph. He slices deeply into the paper, excising a drawing of leafy twigs, cutting as carefully as a surgeon performing an autopsy on the body of a fairy. There are more lithographs beside this one – the same beautiful, realistic rendering of arranged tree parts, all of them awaiting the artist’s knife. 3. The… MORE >
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We Were Always Here: Japanese-American Post-War Pioneers of Art Opens at Heather James Fine Art, San Francisco
April 04, 2019 Original article at ArtfixDaily.com SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Boundary-pushing paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by more than 15 artists including Yayoi Kusama, Ruth Asawa, Arakawa, and Masami Teraoka are on view from April 4 to July 15, 2019, at Heather James Fine Art, San Francisco, 49 Geary Street. We Were Always Here: Japanese-American Post-War Pioneers of Art provides an insightful chapter within the many cross-cultural narratives that developed and flourished in American art after World War II. While several artists featured in the exhibition were born in the U.S., others chose the U.S. as their home. This convergence of identities—taking… MORE >
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Asia Week New York Rings Up $150.5M in Total Sales
NEW YORK , New York March 27, 2019 (ArtfixDaily.com) The 10th anniversary celebration of Asia Week New York—the Asian art extravaganza—which concluded on March 23, 2019– reported that combined sales totaled $150,544,501. At press time, this figure includes 43 out of 48 galleries and the five six auction houses: Bonhams, Christie’s, Doyle, Heritage Auctions and Sotheby’s. (iGavel’s online sale ends April 16). To mark the 10- year milestone, a champagne reception was held in the Patrons Lounge at The Metropolitan Museum of Art to honor a group of ten distinguished collectors, museum professionals and dealers, who have made significant… MORE >
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Kim Cattrall’s Home in New York City Is As Sultry and Fabulous As You’d Expect
By Alyssa Giacobbe March 6, 2017 Full article at Architectural Digest.com Sex & the City actress Kim Cattrall completely reimagined her Park Avenue home to include Parisian flea market finds and tasteful nudes. The entry features a 2005 piece by Los Angeles–based artist Monique van Genderen. Photo: Courtesy of Tony Ingrao
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All’s Fair
Original article at W Magazine by Felix Burrichter February 5, 2014 4:54 pm Monique Van Genderen at the Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair. Photograph courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter and artist. This past weekend Los Angeles provided a welcome escape for Polar Vortex-plagued art lovers: Starting Thursday, there wasn’t just one, not two, but three fairs taking place all over town. Things kicked off with the independent two-day Paramount Ranch fair, held for the first time at the Malibu hills movie set where Paramount used to shoot its Westerns. Thirty-two young, international galleries (like Balice Hertling from Paris, or Federico Vavassori from Milan) and artist-run… MORE >
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Review: Monique van Genderen at Happy Lion Gallery
Original article in the Los Angeles Times JUNE 12, 2009 | 10:00 AM Ten new paintings by Monique van Genderen include some of the most ambitious works this increasingly accomplished artist has produced. For her third solo show at Happy Lion Gallery — the last was in 2005 — Van Genderen established a uniform format. Each work is 6 feet high and 4 feet wide, familiar dimensions for paintings that address a spectator’s body as well as eye. Their carefully calibrated scale initially moves you into place, effortlessly showing you where to stand to look at them. When you do,… MORE >
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PRE-FALL 2019 Badgley Mischka
NEW YORK, DECEMBER 5, 2018 by JANELLE OKWODU Original article at vogue.com The Badgley Mischka woman is changing. “She’s no longer content to sacrifice comfort for style,” shared Mark Badgley during a visit to the brand’s atelier. “No matter the occasion, she still wants to feel comfortable.” That desire for ease was reflected in Badgley Mischka’s seasonal outlook after a fairly bombastic 30th-anniversary collection in September; Pre-Fall with its extended shelf-life and accessible nature called for a fresh direction. Though the duo kept their signatures—bold embellishment and refined shapes—they offered them in new fabrications that focused on movement and lightness. A… MORE >
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Monique Van Genderen at Susanne Vielmetter: Liquid energy, on a grand scale
By DAVID PAGEL SEP 30, 2017 | 7:00 AM Original article in the Los Angeles Times The size of Monique Van Genderen’s paintings on linen and aluminum panel dwarf visitors to her exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in Culver City. Four giant paintings run from one inch above the gallery floor to within one inch of the top of the 14-foot walls. Each of the untitled works is 6½ feet wide. Ten paintings are hung side by side so that you can see the sweeping gestures Van Genderen has made with rags, rollers and mops. The suite measures more than 40… MORE >
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Monique van Genderen Recognized by Headlands Center for the Arts
Original announcement California | Visual Chiaro Award Program 2019 Artist Statement Engaged with the language of abstraction, I explore all the nuances of possible readings; the linguistic, the narrative, the figurative, and the strategic. My own painterly language is a development of individual brushstrokes ranging from the calligraphic to drips of gravitational pull. Manipulating scale to generate a physical and psychological sphere, I expand painting beyond the confines of its traditions, addressing the conditions of our patterns of thought, expectations, and acquired knowledge to create an alternative environment. My love of painting prompts me to continue to create works with… MORE >
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Lance Letscher Dishes on “The Secret Life of Lance Letscher”
THE ACCLAIMED AUSTIN ARTIST IS FEATURED IN A DOC THAT PREMIERED AT SXSW BY CYNTHIA RUBIN | PHOTOS BY ADAM MOROZ Published: April 11, 2017 Original article in Austin Monthly What’s its significance, do you know?” Lance Letscher asks, sounding genuinely curious. He’s standing in his studio before “Blue Hand,” his new collage-in-progress, and has just been told it closely resembles a hamsa, the ancient palm-shaped symbol that’s now a trendy women’s jewelry motif. Letscher’s “Hand,” however, is huge—a pastiche of metal in many shades of impossibly beautiful cobalt blue, overlaid with a scattering of crisscrossed staples. “The wider staples… MORE >
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Asia Week New York Turns 10
BY CONNOR GOODWIN | FEBRUARY 20, 2019 Original article at BlouinArtInfo.com “Day of Osutaka Mountain (1986),” at Tai Modern gallery. This is bamboo artist Yako Hodo’s personal response and memorial to the victims of Japan Airlines Flight 123, which crashed on Osutaka Ridge on August 12, 1985. It is the worst single-aircraft accident in history, taking the lives of 520 people. In the Buddhist faith in Japan, departed souls become part of a collective ancestral being after a period of 33 years. The artist kept this piece in his personal collection for that time period to honor the victims… MORE >
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Alvisi Kirimoto Transforms 32nd Floor of a Skyscraper in Chicago
Original article at dexigner.com Alvisi Kirimoto has designed the executive offices that occupy the entire 32nd floor of a newly built skyscraper in the lively ex-industrial district of West Loop, Chicago. The project, designed to accommodate the client’s headquarters and showcase part of his art collection, fills an area of 2,600 sq. m, within a 224-meter high building located in the heart of the city, on the bank of the homonymous river. “The moment you leave the elevators, arriving on the 32nd floor, you feel as if you were immersing yourself again in the city – at a different height and… MORE >
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Alvisi Kirimoto interior design for offices in Chicago
Author: Alvisi Kirimoto + Partners Photographer: Nic Lehoux 14-02-2019 Original article at floornature.com On the 32nd floor of a Chicago skyscraper, architects Massimo Alvisi and Junko Kirimoto designed the interiors of the executive offices of an important corporation, creating an interior design that projects the layout of the city while leaving room for pieces of archaeology, contemporary art and oriental art from the client’s collection. Other photos… “The moment you leave the elevators, arriving on the 32nd floor, you feel as if you were immersing yourself again in the city – at a different height and perspective, of course, but with… MORE >
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The Woven History of Japanese Bamboo Basketry
Original article at tlmagazine.com Throughout history, bamboo has been and continues to be one of the most fundamental materials in Japanese culture. The fast-growing plant is used across the fields of architecture, furniture making, painting and design. Another area in which bamboo plays a prominent role, that is little-known in the West is in the baskets for the flowers in tea ceremonies. Seemingly niche, this area of bamboo basketry has a rich history and complex craft behind it. For the first time in France, the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac pays homage to the art and skills of Japanese bamboo… MORE >
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How Graciela Iturbide Became One of Mexico’s Greatest Photographers
Elyssa Goodman Feb 8, 2019 Original article at Artsy.net “I’m not magical realism, Surrealism, nothing like that. I’m Graciela Iturbide,” the photographer stated in a 2017 video. Considered one of the greatest contemporary photographers of Mexico, her home country, and of all of Latin America, Iturbide rejects the label of magical realism for her work. “No, magical realism you invented for García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, for the ‘boom’ of literature, and to be able to better sell books,” she continued. As an artist, she hopes to be defined simply as herself. In a career spanning over 50 years, and with… MORE >
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National Spotlight: Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico
By JENN SHAPLAND JANUARY 30, 2019 Original article at themagsantafe.com Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, Massachusetts January 19, 2019 – May 12, 2019 Photos of Mexico from the 1970s to 2005 by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide bring a documentary impulse in touch with a poetic eye. Her photos are personal, yet immersive in cultures not her own; unafraid of the humorous, the strange, and the symbolic. Commissioned in 1978 by the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico to photograph Mexico’s indigenous population, Iturbide traveled with anthropologist Luis Barjau to the Sonoran Desert in northwestern Mexico to live for several… MORE >
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Art Antiques London Consolidates Success with Strong Sales and Increased Visitor Numbers
Original article at Art Daily.org Honda Syoryu, “Revolution”. Madake & rattan, 22 1/2″ x 19″ x 15 1/2″. Photo: Gary Mankus. Photo: Courtesy Tai Gallery. LONDON.- Art Antiques London had much to celebrate when its doors closed on Wednesday 15th June after eight very busy days. The Fair acted as a magnet for collectors and connoisseurs with many established buyers visiting the Fair. Visitors commented on the light airy feel of the Fair and responded very well to the mix of disciplines and objects on display. Strong sales were reported across the board, the lecture series was universally praised and the… MORE >
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Honda Syoryu at Tai Modern
Michael Abatemarco Jul 28, 2017 Original article at Santa Fe New Mexican.com Honda Syoryu: Big Wave, 2016, Madake bamboo and rattan Tai Modern, 1601 Paseo de Peralta, 505-984-1387 Using traditional basketry techniques, Japanese bamboo artist Honda Syoryu creates rhythmic, organic sculptural forms that capture a sense of oscillating movement. Syoryu brings two new bodies of work to Tai Modern for his second solo exhibition: the series Spring and Ring. “When I make my art, I am in constant dialogue with the bamboo,” he said in a statement. “This material’s unique pliability allows me to draw beautiful, naturally curving lines in space.” The exhibit… MORE >
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Celebrating the next generation of Japanese bamboo artists
by Gary Gach Original article at Asian Art.com In conjunction with Masters of Bamboo, the Asian Art Museum held a reception featuring one work each from ten artists considered to be the next generation of this truly amazing art form. This extended display was then kept for a month beyond the week of the reception (February 15–March 18, 2007) before the pieces returned to their owners. More important were the artists themselves, who were present at the event. At the opening reception, artist Honda Syoryu, a disciple of Kadota Niko, addressed the large reception. He attested to the fact that… MORE >
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FIRED EARTH, WOVEN BAMBOO
Original article at Asian Art Newspaper.com THE MUSEUM OF Fine Arts in Boston has recently received a transformative gift of over 90 pieces spanning the late 20th and 21st centuries, given by collectors Stanley and Mary Ann Snider from their Japanese art. This continues the tradition of collectors of Japanese art making donations to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), that have included such gifts from Ernest Fenollosa and William Sturgis Bigelow. Stanley and Mary Ann Snider represent a new generation of Bostonians who want to ensure that visitors to the museum will understand the vibrancy of Japanese art… MORE >
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Beautiful Bedrooms That Double As Home Offices
By Architectural Digest, Contributor 09/23/2015 (photo: William Abranowicz) In the master bedroom of this St. Barts hilltop house, Kang Chang of KangModern designed the desk and stainless-steel light fixture; the desk chair is by Cassina, the armchair is by Pollaro, and the sculpture is by Fujitsuka Shosei.
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‘Bamboo’ Brings Together Tradition and Innovation at CAFAM
The versatile ways contemporary artists use bamboo is explored in a new exhibition at the Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) in Los Angeles. Japanese bamboo weaving is an art form that dates back centuries. A uniquely challenging medium, bamboo can be bent, tied, woven, plaited and dyed in a range of techniques that artisans have developed and passed down through generations of masters. Traditionally used for fine functional objects like baskets, since the 20th century, artists have become increasingly experimental, creating more sculptural works.The works in ‘Bamboo’ show this progression, with objects ranging from functional to fantastical. The inclusion… MORE >
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Weaving a tale: Bamboo arts at The Met
Original article at NY Press.com Entering The Met Fifth Avenue’s Arts of Japan galleries, many visitors can’t help but gasp. We did. The guard on duty said it’s a common response. The exhibition title and signage promised bamboo baskets. It didn’t say anything about a floor-to-ceiling twisting mass of frenetic energy in a site-specific installation by Tanabe Chikuunsai IV.”The Gate,” woven of tiger bamboo, torques and twirls like a funnel cloud, or the tendrils of a great vine, or the circulatory system of some unseen giant. It’s at once ethereal and overpowering, weightless and crushing. It’s extraordinary. At home,… MORE >
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Art and Museums in NYC This Week
Feb. 1, 2018 Original listing on NY Times.com A detail of “Tide” by Fujitsuka Shosei, on view in “Japanese Bamboo Art: The Abbey Collection” at the Met. Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times ‘JAPANESE BAMBOO ART: THE ABBEY COLLECTION’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 4). This fabulous show celebrates Diane and Arthur Abbey’s gift of some 70 bamboo baskets and sculptures, which nearly doubles the Met’s already outstanding holdings in this genre and brings them into the 20th and 21st centuries. The curator has embedded this trove within what is essentially a second exhibition that traces bamboo’s presence… MORE >
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Craftsmanship takes centre stage at The Met’s Japanese bamboo art exhibition
Tide by Fujitsuka Shosei; Photo Courtesy: Fujitsuka Shosei Original article at Architectural Digest.com With this exhibition, what comes to the foreground is the difference in viewing objects. Objects that for hundreds of years were considered simple, everyday utensils now have a place at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. These refined bamboo vessels have been made using local traditions and techniques passed down from generation to generation. It was around the 19th century that bamboo craftsmanship began to be recognised as one of the traditional Japanese decorative arts, and later as an art form. Flow by Yamaguchi Ryuun; Photo… MORE >
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‘Bends’ at Thomas Solomon Gallery: Review by George Melrod
Bart Exposito, ‘Bends (Blue),’ 2010, Acrylic and pastel on canvas, 84 x 72” Photo: Joshua White, Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Solomon Gallery Review by George Melrod Original review at visual art source.com Painter Bart Exposito has been pushing forward in one, very specific direction for nearly a decade and almost every stage of the journey along the way has been compelling. And now, like a spelunker following a narrow passage in a cave only to burst through to a brilliant new chamber, he has brought forth a sumptuous new body of work that is also a logical extension… MORE >
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Bart Exposito displays a love of line and a certain playfulness at Susanne Vielmetter
Bart Exposito, “Untitled,” 2015, acrylic on canvas, from his exhibition, “Strange Alphabet,” at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. (Robert Wedemeyer / Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects) Original article at LA Times.com If Agnes Martin had been a penmanship teacher who didn’t care whether her students followed the rules, her lessons might look like Bart Exposito’s new paintings at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. A great love of line animates “Strange Alphabet.” Its 10 variously sized acrylics on canvas articulate Exposito’s passion for soft colors, particularly the ways their shifts in tint resonate with one another. Some hum wonderfully, their delicate… MORE >
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5 Questions with Bart Exposito
Bart Exposito “Untitled”, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 60″ H x 48″ W (152.4 cm H x 121.92 cm W) Gallery Inventory #EXP106 Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects Photo: Robert Wedemeyer 10 Jul 2015 Original article at Elephant.art Bart Exposito’s paintings have previously referenced geometry and corporate logos, drawing parallels with graphic design and creating a flat surface, that is almost flatter than flat. Elephant caught up with the artist as his most figurative show yet, Strange Alphabet, opens at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Where are you right now (and is it where you want to be)? I presently… MORE >
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DECIPHERING BART EXPOSITO’S “STRANGE ALPHABET”
Original article at New American Paintings.com After living in Los Angeles for 14 years, Bart Exposito knew the exact moment returning to life as usual in sunny California was no longer an option. In 2012, after participating in a residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute, his mind was made up and as he put it, “I just decided right then I wasn’t leaving.” He marks his return to L.A. with Strange Alphabet at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, which showcases his latest body of work as a continuation of his interest in design, typography and affinity for line. – Claude Smith Albuquerque/Santa Fe Contributor Exposito’s… MORE >
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PULSE New York 2009
Penelope Umbrico 4,786,139 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 1/14/09 2007-2009 4″ x 6″ machine prints [detail of installation] The 2009 New York art fairs closed ten days ago, and I wouldn’t bring them up now, since there’s so much interesting that’s been happening since, except that there are still a few images of good work knocking about in my head (and in my laptop), and they insist on getting out. This entry will describe work seen at PULSE New York; I expect to do at least one more post before I’m done. The image at the top of this post is of Penelope… MORE >
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SILENT MOMENTS IN ERIK BENSON’S CITY
Painter Erik Benson’s urban landscapes are about subtleties: the silence of the city at night, the ethereal bright squares of colors broken by creeping twigs and barbed wire, the slight raise of acrylic layers on the canvas. The effect sinks in after a few moments, and viewers might find themselves lost in thought, hardly realizing they’ve drifted away. “We live in a time where everything’s so fast and constant,” says Benson, whose show “Sleep Walking” is currently on view at Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Arts. “It’s nice to have a quiet moment with something.” If the dark buildings in Benson’s… MORE >
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Noboru Fujinuma, a Living National Treasure of Japan, visits Japan House
JEANNETTE YAN: Noboru Fujinuma, a renowned contemporary basket artist, creates a chabana container used for flowers during a tea ceremony at the Japan House on Oct. 24. Fujinuma is a Living National Treasure of Japan, meaning he is certified as a preserver of important, intangible, cultural properties. While teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago, Professor Emeritus Shozo Sato was asked to translate for Japanese bamboo artist Noboru Fujinuma. Sato graciously agreed. Fujinuma, who spoke little English, was visiting after some of his bamboo work was bought and donated to the Art Institute of Chicago. Translating during the exhibition… MORE >
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Western taste for bamboo art is transforming an ancient Japanese tradition
Credit: Minoura Chikuhō When Japan opened up to the world in the middle of the 19th century, Western merchant ships were quick to return home with exotic art from the once reclusive nation. The private galleries and curiosity shops of London and Paris were flooded with Japanese woodblock prints, calligraphy and ceramics. But one traditional art form was, in retrospect, conspicuous by its absence — woven bamboo baskets. At the time, bamboo weaving was still viewed in the context of the practical tools it yielded — ropes, kitchen utensils, baskets and boxes. Despite requiring decades of mastery and being steeped… MORE >
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At BAM, bamboo works that are anything but traditional
“Spring Tide,” a basket of bamboo and lacquer, by Fujinuma Noboru. What comes to mind with bamboo? Groves of tall, graceful, shushing, clonking stems? Eco-friendly building material? If you’re into art, you might think of delicate paintings of bamboo or meticulously plaited baskets. As one of Japan’s most abundant natural resources, bamboo has been a popular material and subject for centuries, although the training and expertise involved has limited its practitioners. Today, according to some accounts, there are fewer than 100 professional bamboo artists. In the hands of the 17 artists in “Modern Twist: Contemporary Japanese Bamboo Art,” on… MORE >
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‘Sunday at The Met’ Series to Feature Bamboo Artist Fujinuma Noboru
The October 22 program in the Sunday at The Met series will complement the exhibition Japanese Bamboo Art: The Abbey Collection with a discussion and live demonstration that explore the techniques of bamboo basketry. The exhibition – which is on view through February 4, 2018 – features works of Japanese bamboo art dating from the late 19th century to the present, and this program explores the craft and history behind contemporary bamboo basketry. The program begins with a discussion at 2 p.m. with Fujinuma Noboru, bamboo artist and Living National Treasure of Japan; Suzanne Ross, urushi artist; and Monika Bincsik, Assistant Curator in the Museum’s… MORE >
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New bamboo: Modern twists on an ancient art form
Fukunishi Ryosei: Spring Frangrance in the Air, 2011, madake and rattan Ceramics, calligraphy, and woodblock printing — all of them among the traditional arts of Japan — have been passed down from generation to generation for centuries. But out of these traditions have emerged a number of contemporary artists whose work is innovative and unique, transforming older art forms from the inside out. The same has occurred with Japanese bamboo basketry. Emerging Bamboo, an exhibition of basketry and sculptural forms on view at TAI Gallery, presents a selection of work by up-and-coming Japanese artists who are redefining the parameters of the… MORE >
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Venture into the World of Bamboo Sculpture
Nagakura Kenichi Face 1, 2007 (left), madake, rattan, lacquer and powdered polishing stone and clay {h. 19 in, w. 7 in, d. 4 in}. Anne and Arnold Porath Collection. Face II, 2007 (right), madake, rattan, lacquer and powdered polishing stone and clay {h. 16 1/2 in, w. 5 1/2 in, d. 5 1/2 in}. Anne and Arnold Porath Collection. Author: Christine Kaminsky The Japan Society Gallery New Bamboo: Contemporary Japanese Masters New York, New York October 4, 2008 – January 11, 2009 One glimpse of Kawana Tetsunori’s split-bamboo installation, Enclosure, majestically standing in a pond on an island in The Japan Society’s modernist lobby, leads you… MORE >
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Bamboo: A trajectory in basketry and sculpture
The Craft & Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) in Los Angeles presents Bamboo, an exhibition of 30 historical and contemporary works that explore the trajectory of Japanese bamboo basketry and sculpture. Drawn mostly from the Los Angeles-based Cotsen Collection, this exhibition reflects the evolution of the art form—from Chinese-style tea ceremony baskets to striking contemporary sculptures. A large-scale, site-specific installation by Japan-based artist Akio Hizume evokes the possibilities of bamboo as an artistic material. The exhibition will open on May 27 and run through September 9, 2018. Fine bamboo basketry gained a foothold in Japanese culture during Japan’s medieval period (1185-1573… MORE >
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A Granite Sofa at Skylands
Skylands, my home in Maine, is now the temporary residence of an original reproduction of a Federalist period Grecian Sofa. The “Granite Sofa” is a four-thousand pound sculpture carved out of one single piece of pink granite. It was delivered after friends suggested I house the art piece while the museum caring for it underwent renovations. I thought it would be fun, and I was sure I could find a suitable place for it. It’s a beautifully crafted carving by sculptor, Russ Kaufman, for Celeste Roberge, the internationally known artist who wanted it as a monument to the original… MORE >
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Celeste Roberge – and her art – are all about seaweed
When Celeste Roberge restored the barn on her South Portland property in the early 2000s, she strengthened the foundation, poured cement floors, straightened the walls and made the whole thing sturdy and tight. It was out of necessity. Roberge made large-scale sculptures from heavy metal, stone and other materials, and required a workshop strong enough to support it. “I did work big,” she said. “Not so much anymore.” Today, the barn is filled with dozens of varieties of seaweed. There are long strands hanging to dry, delicate clumps rounded into balls and more piled on top of other things. It… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Fay Ku: Double Entendre
Fay Ku: Double Entendre November 20 – December 31, 2009 SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming show, Fay Ku: Double Entendre. The exhibition, which will feature a number of new works on paper, coincides with the artist’s invitation to create a print at the University of New Mexico’s Tamarind Institute. During her residency, Ku will collaborate with Tamarind’s master printers to produce a limited-edition lithograph, a proof of which will be on display during the artist’s show at Eight Modern. “I think my work will lend itself quite well to printmaking” Ku says.… MORE >
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NYFA – An Interview with Erik Benson
By: Suzan Sherman I met with Erik Benson in his DUMBO studio this past summer, when he was a resident artist in the 2009 Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program. Down the hall from NYFA’s offices, Benson’s studio offered sweeping views of the Brooklyn Bridge, the East River, and beyond it to the urban landscape often portrayed in his paintings. Benson and I sat together in front of one of his works-in-progress, a painting of a half-built house. Earlier in the day, he had rendered the small light brown flecks in its particle board walls. One of the hallmarks of Benson’s… MORE >
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Linda Whitaker: The Floor of the Sky
There happens to be a Wassily Kandinsky exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and it is to Kandinsky I would compare Linda Whitaker’s freewheeling sense of color. In many of her oil-pastel-on-paper drawings—her works can’t really be called paintings although they are indeed painterly—there is also a similar ability to abstract essential forms from nature and re-present them as examples of “shoot-the-works modernity,” a phrase I’ve borrowed from Peter Schjedahl’s recent New Yorker review of the Kandinsky show. Seeing yet another exhibit of landscape images from New Mexico might be a tad off-putting if Whitaker hadn’t managed to… MORE >
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Painting by Other Means, Collages by Lance Letscher
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT ART HAD NO PLACE ELSE TO GO, along comes Lance Letscher with collages that reignite the element of surprise that was the medium’s birthright. Opening today at Howard Scott Gallery is a body of work that is a magical blend of whimsy and grit. Collage has been described as an art of interruption because of the medium’s abrupt breaks of texture, pattern and plane But for a young Texas artist juggling three jobs and family life in the early 1990s, the term meant something quite literal. Impelled by a fractured work schedule, Mr. Letscher set aside… MORE >
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Lance Letscher: Quiltlike Collages
In the summers of his youth, Lance Letscher cleaned out vacated rental properties owned by his grandparents in northeast Texas. The expanse of grazing pasture and cotton fields resurfaces in his intricate, geometric collages, along with a curious habit of imagining other people’s lives from the traces left behind. His landscape compositions, sometimes mural-sized, recall Paul Klee paintings, aerial photographs, or stratigraphic maps, charged with a certain psychological resonance. Trained as a printmaker at the University of Texas, Letscher starts with an intuitive sense of palette and scale. He prospects thrift stores, junk shops, and used bookshelves for old ledgers,… MORE >
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The Way of Ku
If art is a means of articulation, consider artist Fay Ku fluent. Double Entendre, her solo exhibition at Eight Modern in Santa Fe, features nine recent works on paper. The majority are drawn and painted in variations of graphite, ink and watercolor. Two of the pieces are lithographs, the breathtaking results of Ku’s November residency at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque. Altogether, the collection communicates incongruous concepts—purity/eroticism, solitude/association, fulfillment/affliction, elegance/disgrace——as balancing counterparts. The beauty of Ku’s aesthetic is startling, as are the nature of her subjects and the acts she depicts. At first, it feels as though these elements—like the… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Lance Letscher: The Perfect Machine
Lance Letscher: The Perfect Machine April 2 – May 15, 2010 Artists’ Reception: April 2, 5:30 – 7:30 pm SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Lance Letscher: The Perfect Machine. Letscher harvests defaced textbooks, children’s readers, vintage album covers, magazine clippings, handwritten notes, recipe cards, business ledgers, and other bits of found paper from closeout bins, yard sales and the dumpster behind a nearby used book and record store in his native Austin. In his studio, the artist winnows through and organizes these odds and ends, cuts them into strips and shapes… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Jan Adlmann: Latter-Day Fabergé
December 11 – January 30 NEW MEXICO— Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Jan Adlmann: Latter-Day Fabergé. Jan Ernst Adlmann is a Santa Fe resident well-known as a former museum director and curator, lecturer and writer, whose strange and wonderful sculptures have attracted a strong following over the past ten years. While “zany” is a word that almost always falls flat, it seems almost muted when used to discuss the tremendous enthusiasm that courses through Adlmann’s inventive creations. For this exhibition, Adlmann will present both new work and a selection of past favorites on loan from some… MORE >
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Jessica Abel Biography
The short version: Cartoonist and writer Jessica Abel is the author of a textbook, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, about making comics, written in collaboration with her husband, the cartoonist Matt Madden; and the graphic novel La Perdida(Pantheon Books). She’s also the co-writer of the graphic novel Life Sucks. Previously, she published Soundtrackand Mirror, Window(Fantagraphics Books), two collections that gather stories and drawings from her comic book Artbabe, which she published between 1992 and 1999. She collaborated with Ira Glass on “Radio: An Illustrated Guide”, a non-fiction comic about how the radio show This American Life is made. Abel won… MORE >
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Jason Salavon
The title of Jason Salavon’s recent exhibition, “Annex and Catalogue,” directly and elegantly signaled his interests and concerns. The sale annex, with its promise of discounted plenty, and the catalogue, bringing consumer temptations to our mailboxes, provided the raw material that the artists transformed into impassive grids of colored rectangles and glacially paced video installations. In the two videos, Still Life II (Glassware) and Catalogue to the Sun and Moon (all works 2007), tumblers and goblets and living-room furnishings go through countless variations in the course of more than an hour: the metal coffee table becomes wood; the lamp changes… MORE >
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Lance Letscher Slices, Dices, and Designs Devices
Santa Fe Reporter By: John Photos Published April 2008 Collage may be the most relevant medium for contemporary culture. The cutting up and repurposing of discarded and obsolete print media is the artist’s version of recycling and sustainability. It reflects thriftiness, a clever way to pinch pennies in a time of job instability and tightened belts. But collage also is a distillation of the way we consume information in pieces and without much context. From playlists to video clips to “news” websites that cater to demographics, information is as modular and customizable as any other possession. That said, due to… MORE >
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Every Playboy Centerfold
“I’m performing a heartless mathematical operation, but it has a relationship with [early abstractionists] who took the reality of the situation and brought something to it that made it bigger than the individual moment.” -Jason Salavon Jason Salavon selects as source material groups of images from popular culture—real-estate listing photographs, Playboy centerfolds, high-school yearbook portraits—and blends them into generalized images characteristics of types existing in everyday life. For the above photograph, Every Playboy Centerfold, The 1980’s, Salavon chose to blend pictures of not-so-average women in a series entitled Every Playboy Centerfold. By fusing 120 centerfolds from each decade in… MORE >
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Art in Review: Jason Salavon
What if you wanted to create an image that could stand as the epitome of an artistic movement such as Impressionism or a painting style such as Baroque? Where would you begin? By examining the colors used by the artists associated with them? Or by looking at their subject matter? Jason Salavon, whose show Arrows and Dice can be seen at Eight Modern, has one solution that, on casual inspection, looks like a reduction of these painting styles into simple color components presented as a series of geometric, mandala-like forms. On the surface, that is exactly what they are, but… MORE >
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Katherine Lee: The Brazil Series
THE Magazine By: Jon Carver Published August 2009 Through the blackened atmosphere and archway of Katherine Lee’s incredible Exterior 10 resides some serious heartbreak. And like all the pain and misery that comes with romance, it is utterly irresistible. Dark black like a cat, the shiny pelt of the picture brims with morbid ennui, degeneration, and despair. Perfection. Exterior 9 masterfully balances the tensions of abandonment, tragic disregard, and ruinous disappointment with the everyday, off-season aspects of the real. Is this the patio where the bizarre triple murder took place before the shabby resort closed down in ’93, or is… MORE >
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An American Knockoff
Santa Fe Reporter By Enrique Limon Published August 8, 2012 As witnessed in his latest show, An American Knockoff, seasoned artist Roger Shimomura’s work walks the line between political statement and absurdity—a result, he says, of spending his formative years trying to find a sense of place. “Most of my work is based around growing up being a person of color,” he tells SFR, adding that all the things that “bothered” him as a child continue to do so today. Not having any prominent Asian-American figures in pop culture to look up to during his youth, he looked inside his… MORE >
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Curiouser and curiouser: the extra-ness of Katherine Lee
Santa Fean By Devon Jackson Published October/ November 2010 My thoughts on Katherine Lee: She’s gifted and she knows it. She’s all of 25, perceives herself to be three times that age, but could pass for 17 (although a tough 17). She has a babyish face, but her carriage, attitude, demeanor and personal are all assertive, surly, irreverent, and glib—ways of being that probably set in during early childhood in Iowa (where she grew up with an older sister, a twin brother, a father employed in emergency management, and underwriter mother), amid so many other fair-haired, fair-skinned, fair-behaved girls. And… MORE >
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Katherine Lee: Animal Violence and Topless Women Eating Jam
Katherine Lee‘s second solo show at Eight Modern, following last year’s exhibition of her “Brazil Series” paintings, reflects a significant change in the work of the versatile 25-year-old artist. The 31 drawings that comprise Animal Violence and Topless Women Eating Jam represent a significant departure from her painted works, not only in medium and style but in subject matter as well. The studied mastery of her craft, the freshness of approach and the iconoclastic attitude towards artistic tropes that g ave the unpeopled environments of Lee’s Exterior paintings such affective power are still present in her drawings. However, the works in Animal Violence are grotesque and messily visceral,… MORE >
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Beauty and Drama
Albuquerque Journal North By Kate McGraw Published October 29, 2010 Katherine Lee, a 2008 bachelor of fine arts graduate of the College of Santa Fe, says she has no “messages” to send through her art – but she is full of ideas. Her latest group of notions, 31 drawings in pencil and other media, opens in a solo show at Eight Modern today, intriguingly titled “Animal Violence and Topless Women Eating Jam.” It’s a change of media for Lee, whose paintings from her “Brazil Series” headlined a show at the same gallery last summer. “She’s always been drawing and we… MORE >
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Roebling Hall Art Gallery
Erik Benson makes paintings that are informed by fragments of urban landscape and culture that are found in the everyday. He is particularly attracted to imagery that is ubiquitous within an urban architectonic setting, in which elements of plasticity and temporality are depicted in a suspended state of in-betweeness. It is his intention that these elements incorporate a resonance of a special psycho-geography of place and placelesness that conveys the infrastructure (physically, psychologically, and conceptually) of an urban landscape. An urban sampling of fragment and space, that attempts to express something new about the spaces we inhabit. Benson is interested… MORE >
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Erik Benson: Perfect Memory and Angelina Gualdoni: Fringe City
Exploring the intersection of utopian architecture into our culture, Finesilver Gallery has brought together two artists that focus on landscape, isolation, and community. On the first floor, Chicago artist Angelina Gualdoni presents Fringe City, six paintings that depict a somewhat desolate landscape. While she investigates various states of ruin, Gualdoni also presents an optimistic viewpoint. Her isolated representations of city, suburban, and country structures are not just records of a declining society, they are imbued with a hopeful outlook for renewed generative life. Gualdoni’s small watercolors and gouaches on paper and her large canvases are each a portrait study of… MORE >
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Department of Visual Arts: University of Chicago
Using software processes of his own design, Jason Salavon generates and reconfigures masses of communal material in an effort to present new perspectives on the familiar. His projects unearth unexpected pattern while exploring the relationship between the part and the whole or the individual and the group. Reflecting a natural attraction to popular culture and the day-to-day, his work regularly incorporates the use of common references and source material. The final compositions are exhibited as art objects, such as photographic prints and video installations, while others exist in a real-time software context. Born in Indiana, raised in Texas, and based… MORE >
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Orchestrating Desire
Austin artist Lance Letscher’s latest children’s book is “The Perfect Machine” (2010, University of Texas Press, Austin) and that is — no coincidence, obviously—the title of the exhibition of 17 recent Letscher collages opening at Eight Modern today. The book didn’t influence his art, except indirectly. He says doing a 9-by-12-foot commissioned mural for the Dell Children’s Medical Center of central Texas focused his art, “I started thinking about kids as my audience. It started to influence the vocabulary I was using,” Letscher said. “It used to be all chance and discovery. Now I am orchestrating what I want, instead… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Jason Salavon: Arrows and Dice
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition with Jason Salavon. This will be the artist’s first show at Eight Modern. One of the leading practitioners of computer-based art, Salavon uses software of his own design to capture and transfigure data and images drawn from popular culture, art history and contemporary lived experience. The resulting videos and photographic prints often obscure the distinctiveness of their sources while revealing the visual architecture and conventions that unite them. “I’m just performing a pretty heartless mathematical operation on a series of data, where I set up a… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – David X Levine: She Kept Her Heart Parked on a Hill
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, David X Levine: She Kept Her Heart Parked on a Hill. Inspired by popular music of the 20th century, Levine works with colored pencils, building up fields of intensely saturated color with millions of pencil strokes and buffing the surfaces to a smooth, waxy finish. The dimensions of these labor-intensive drawings range from six to 70 inches. Levine’s playful and expressive forms have an anthropomorphic quality, occupying an ambiguous space between the figurative and the purely abstract or, as one reviewer states, “a resting on the… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Katherine Lee: Animal Violence and Topless Women Eating Jam
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Katherine Lee: Animal Violence and Topless Women Eating Jam. Lee’s second solo show at Eight Modern, following last year’s exhibition of her “Brazil Series” paintings, reflects a significant change in the work of the versatile 25-year-old artist. The 31 drawings that comprise Animal Violence and Topless Women Eating Jam represent a significant departure from her painted works, not only in medium and style but in subject matter as well. The studied mastery of her craft, the freshness of approach and the iconoclastic attitude towards artistic tropes… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Teo González: New Work
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Teo González: New Work. Teo González, a Spanish-born painter based in Brooklyn, is known for his minimalist compositions on square canvases. Using monochromatic color schemes, the artist first applies a simple ground using pigments he mixes himself, then builds a grid of thousands of precisely placed dots of paint. But where he once placed small pools of paint diluted with water, and then added a second drop of paint into that mixture, allowing the physics of evaporation to determine much of the creative course, González now… MORE >
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Erik Benson: Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art
Erik Benson’s exquisite show “Detouring” reassembled and animated urban blight. With layered slivers and strips of collaged acrylic paint, Benson creates vistas of his Bushwick, Brooklyn, neighborhood. His recent works, show here, tend to be grimier than past efforts and somewhat atmospheric as a result of the artist’s direct painting on canvas (whether by hand or sprayer). Yet while displaying wear on the surfaces, the paintings also retain the graphic precision of the previous work. These pieces revealed laborious design and painterly dissolution. In Americana (2011), a construction-stalled building is pushed backward in a scrim of gray haze, calling attention… MORE >
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Erik Benson: Eminent Domain
Erik Benson’s dystopian and romantic artwork of layered acrylic on canvas has been labeled as both descriptive of the urban beauty and reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints. Benson’s stark graphic interpretations of urban reality are formulated on glass tables, where he spreads thin layers of acrylic paint, allows the paint to dry, then cuts out shapes with an X-Acto knife. He then composes his images in a collage-style, layering the shapes into arresting portrayals of urban landscapes. Benson’s art focuses on the everyday scenery of metropolitan life, albeit one that is void of humanity. Though he is careful to take… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Bart Johnson: The Truth Hurts
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Bart Johnson: The Truth Hurts. Bart Johnson compares his working habits to Camus’s Sisyphus endlessly rolling his rock up a hill. Often sly or humorous in expression, with a certain playfulness and eroticism, the Albuquerque-area artist’s drawings and ceramics would seem to refute the grinding laboriousness implied by the metaphor; however, Johnson’s diligence and all-encompassing engagement with art and the creative process cannot be denied. A lifelong student of art history with a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth and a MFA from The School of the Art… MORE >
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Bart Johnson
The Santa Fe New Mexican, Pasatiempo By Rob DeWalt Published Friday, June 17th, 2011 “I live in a culture that insists on infantile commercial products aimed at never letting in any bad news,” New Mexico artist Bart Johnson told Pasatiempo. Surrealism, eroticism, a sense of mythology, and, at times, a whimsical, almost Boschian view of human and animal physical forms accent much of Johnson’s work. Bart Johnson: The Truth Hurts, an exhibit of his paintings, drawings, and ceramics, opens at Eight Modern on Friday, June 17th. “The title of the exhibit is black humor, which is how I view what… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Ted Larsen: Brand New, Slightly Used
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Ted Larsen: Brand New, Slightly Used. This will be Larsen’s second solo show with the gallery. A long-time Santa Fe resident and recent Pollock-Krasner grant recipient, Ted Larsen creates abstract constructed objects from salvage materials. In Brand New, Slightly Used, Larsen not only explores the detritus of consumer culture, but also critically examines cherished modernist principles and hierarchies. Larsen finds and repurposes old pieces of scrap metal and other “non-art materials.” The humble materials and intimate scale of his sculpture reflect the artist’s stated desire to… MORE >
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Brick by Stick, The Cityscapes of Erik Benson
Erik Benson paints scenes that are quiet and still. There are no people in his paintings, though traces of their presence are everywhere. If ever a case could be made for seeing paintings up close, the work of Brooklyn-based painter Erik Benson is it. There is a clarity and attention to detail in the group of Benson’s paintings on view at Eight Modern that, while possible to achieve with brushwork, cannot be properly appreciated until it is understood that he is working with an unusual application of collage. “It looks like flat line, architectural work, until you actually see it,”… MORE >
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Beauty in Blight
Erik Benson’s urban landscapes have a poetic quality. Erik Benson might qualify as a sculptor as much as a painter. His process is one of building a painting in collaged layers of acrylic paint, much as a sculptor might build a bas-relief. The resulting works will show at Eight Modern gallery on Delgado Street in an exhibition called “Eminent Domain,” opening today and running through June 4. Benson’s contemporary landscape paintings “are simultaneously dystopian and romantic, exhibiting a discerning intelligence and graphic punch,” gallery registrar Meghan Ferguson writes. “He works with acrylic paint, which he spreads in thin layers on… MORE >
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Erik Benson
Eric Benson’s first New York solo exhibition offers seven elegantly crafted, exquisitely designed collage paintings of an imagined contemporary American landscape. The paintings, all from 2006, depict all-too-familiar urban sprawl full of incongruously sited International Style glass skyscrapers, decaying forms that have outlived their usefulness, and ubiquitous cookie cutter housing developments on the frontier of suburbia. Employing sharp-edged realism and a novel technique of collage-as-painting, these intensely crafted, low-relief images have affinities with Kara Walker’s cutout silhouettes as well as anime. Benson painstakingly cuts a wide range of shapes, down to the smallest details, from prepared dried skeins of acrylic… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Erik Benson: Eminent Domain
April 15 – June 4 Artist’s Reception: April 15, 5:00-7:00 p.m. Contact: Meghan Ferguson 505 995 0231 info@eightmodern.net SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Erik Benson: Eminent Domain. Erik Benson’s contemporary landscape paintings are simultaneously dystopian and romantic, exhibiting a discerning intelligence and graphic punch. He works with acrylic paint, which he spreads in thin layers on a glass table to dry before using an X-Acto knife to cut it into shapes. Benson peels off these decal-like pieces and collages them into the picture, building up the surface of the canvas into… MORE >
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Nature in Nature: Robert Lobe in Prospect Park
In traditional Japanese gardens, art and nature are so delicately nuanced and balanced that it is often difficult to discern where, exactly, nature ends and art begins. The natural and the handmade–wilderness and rationality–are in harmony. Sculptor Robert Lobe (b.1945) may not have the sensitivity of a Japanese gardener (his blunt forms are equally indebted to stage design, the art of trompe-l’oeil and the sculpture of David Smith), but his three hammered aluminum repousse sculptures– placed in and around Lullwater near the Boathouse in Prospect Park–wed Eastern and Western sensibilities. Mr. Lobe’s hollow sculptures, which span nearly 12 feet by… MORE >
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All in One: Paintings by Rebecca Shore
New American Paintings By Jenni Higginbotham Published May 2, 2012 In conjunction with an exhibition at Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago, Eight Modern Gallery (Santa Fe, New Mexico), will show the paintings of Rebecca Shore (NAP #41) until May 5. This two-gallery exhibit, titled All in One, features about 50 paintings, 23 of which are at Eight Modern. — All in One can be viewed as two bodies of work. One group of paintings features arrangements of absurd silhouettes and shapes on a flat ground color. Her color combinations are mostly neutrals and hues within a single color family with… MORE >
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Local Artist Sparks his own Lance Fever
AMERICAN-STATESMAN By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Publish June 12, 2004 Lance Fever has struck Austin again. No, not the excitement that every summer surrounds cycling champion Lance Armstrong when he races in the Tour de France. This brand of Lance Fever surrounds artist Lance Letscher, the 42-year-old native Austinite who in the past half dozen years or so has emerged as one of the most popular — and most collected — artists in Austin. Now, thanks to an eight-year survey of his work at the Austin Museum of Art and a simultaneous show of new work at D. Berman Gallery,… MORE >
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Lance Letscher: The Perfect Machine, at D Berman Gallery
Lance Letscher’s new show is an array of his familiar collage style in two dimensions and of iconic objects of adventure (pistols, a full-size motorcycle), expanding the artist’s scope of expression by way of illustrating his first children’s book, The Perfect Machine. Letscher’s work, long a sort of paper kaleidoscope of broken text and images built from butchered books and other bastions of print arranged in seemingly obsessive patterns, makes the leap from flat ground only after exploding on that surface. The narrative of The Perfect Machineis vividly captured by what are possibly Letscher’s most representational creations thus far, with… MORE >
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The Book on Lance Letscher
Austin Chronicle BY MADELINE IRVINE Published June 25, 2004 What lies behind the buzz of Austin’s hot collage artist Lance Letscher has more than buzz going on; he has mystique workin’, too. The buzz comes from Letscher’s art: poetic collages concocted from “found” papers – album covers, books, handwritten recipes, notes, and magazine clippings among them – which are meticulously cut and arranged into intriguing patterns and textures that open up worlds of thoughts and associations. It’s part of what’s led the Austin-born and -bred artist to have two shows up in town simultaneously: “Books and Parts of Books: 1996-2004,”… MORE >
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Lance Letscher
A walk past timber skeletons and heavy machinery, through the dust and haze of waning afternoon sunrays, up the narrow staircase above the carpenter shop and directly into other people’s lives – a chaotic lexicon of thousands of pieces scattered, stacked, filed, layered, lost and found, trimmed, sliced, and glued pieces of lives waiting for resurrection. Lance Letscher assembles and reassembles this universe into a carnival of collaged art exhibited throughout galleries in the United States and Europe as well as in several books. But perhaps none of those showcases feeling quite so viscerally present and immediate than the infinite… MORE >
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Painstaking Process with Paper
Jackson Hole Weekly By Aaron Wallis Published Wednesday, February 02, 2011 Jackson Hole, Wyo.—I recently spoke to Austin, Texas artist Lance Letscher about his upcoming exhibition at Tayloe Piggott Gallery. The gallery press release described Letscher’s work as “drawing comparisons to James Castle, Josef Albers and Piet Mondrian.” That’s a tall order to fill. Though the artist was himself quite modest, polite and almost embarrassed by the comparison. Letscher’s work consists of multi-layered, almost sculptural, collages assembled from a wide array of paper sources, then glued to masonite. I don’t really see any similarity to James Castle, known for using… MORE >
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Paintings with Throwaways
Pasatiempo, The Santa Fe New Mexican By Rob DeWalt April 2-8, 2010 In late fall 2009, while assembling catalog images for an exhibit in Texas and another opening this weekend at Eight Modern in Santa Fe, Austin-based collage artist Lance Letscher began to recognize a continuity and an underlying narrative in some of his newer work. From image to image, a story took shape, and Letscher began to explore uncharted territory: the creation of a self-penned children’s book featuring his art. The result, titled The Perfect Machine(University of Texas Press, 2010), is the focus of Letscher’s exhibit in Santa Fe,… MORE >
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A Boy and his Brain
When I met Lance Letscher in his tidy studio in North Austin, I felt a flicker of recognition though it was the first time we’d met. Letscher’s made a name for himself with his detailed, colorful collages that create imaginary worlds out of relics of the past, including houses and cars cut out of vintage model train catalogs. He’s also the artist and author of a children’s book, The Perfect Machine, and that’s where we’d first been introduced. Letscher’s quiet intensity has seeped into the book; you could call it a conceptual autobiography. The Perfect Machine takes place inside the… MORE >
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A Texas Treasure Hunt: Lance Letscher’s Stunning Chelsea Debut
New York Observer By Mario Naves Published April 17, 2002 As if to prove that the most exciting contemporary art is made by the least usual of suspects, here comes Lance Letscher from Austin, Tex. Mr. Letscher, who is having his first solo New York exhibition at the Howard Scott Gallery, is unusual not just in terms of his geography, but also in his aesthetic. Uninterested in fashion, resistant to pomp and constitutionally incapable of the rote of superficial, he’s something we don’t encounter too often: an artist of substance, grit and purpose. Mr. Letscher makes abstract collages from found… MORE >
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Collage Artist displays ‘Machine’
An array of colorful paper strips cheerfully swathes the rustic, mechanical frame of a 9mm gun. Only the tip and trigger of the weapon remains uncovered to remind viewers that although the object is given a lighthearted aesthetic, it is not a toy. From this gun to a neon-green bike decorated with geometric paper cutouts to a paper collage of a boy slumped in a chair, Austin artist Lance Letscher playfully presents the juxtaposition of human emotion and machine in his new exhibition, “The Perfect Machine.” The exhibit features collages of objects in conjunction with the publication of the artist’s… MORE >
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Lance Letscher
“When something is designed as a utilitarian object, decisions are made in its construction that give it a voice – what fabrics are available – and I am trying to invest the work with a structure that has an underlying logic of craft that is expressive of something else: a personal and intimate experience in making it,” says Austin-based Lance Letscher (as found here at D Berman gallery). My friend Donald insisted I check out Letscher’s book, which he thought I’d love, and I do. I appreciate how Letscher’s work inevitably enfolds history through his use of materials/remnants, and his… MORE >
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He’s Booked
Lance Letscher has said that making art was “a foundational element of my personality.” His mother was a graduate of the art school at the University of Texas at Austin, where Letscher grew up being given art supplies for Christmas and birthdays. At UT, Letscher found the medium of printmaking to be a natural extension for his drawing skills, and through it he developed his understanding of color — particularly — he has said in previous interviews, “color harmonies, mixing and balance.” Letscher was trained as a printmaker at the University of Texas art school, where he received his bachelor’s… MORE >
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The Perfect Machine: Lance Letscher Exhibit at D Berman Gallery
By Spike Gillespie PublishedApril 20, 2010 One again, D Berman Gallery unleashes yet another fabulous installation. This time around, visitors can take in—and, if the price is right, take home—one of the fantastic Letscher collages currently on display. Sure, I enjoy a good black and white photo exhibit from time to time, but color pulls me in even more. In “The Perfect Machine,” Letscher serves up his vision just the way I prefer it: bright, busy and, in some instances, three-dimensional—pieced together from whatever found prints the Austin artist happened upon during his creative jaunts around town. If bold and… MORE >
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Lance Letscher, D Berman Gallery
The protagonist of Lance Letscher’s recent children’s book asks himself a question: “What is the perfect machine?” It is a question that pervades Letscher’s recent exhibition at D. Berman Gallery, a collection of collage works that also serve to illustrate the book that shares the exhibition’s title The Perfect Machine. Frenetic abstract assemblages in children’s block colors cover the walls of the galleries. Peeking through and behind these more formal geometric abstractions are images of shifts and gears, cut-out ransom note letters, and sections of children’s books from the 1950s and 60s. The works create a tension between the handmade… MORE >
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The Trash Collector
By Stephanie Pearson Published July 2010 “Part of what I want you to ask is, how the hell did that get put together?” The question did cross my mind. I’m standing in Ted Larsen’s studio, a small, light space in a studio complex off Upper Canyon Road, puzzling over how the 46-year-old sculptor welded and screwed together dozens of geometric boxes in a way that creates a colorful, chaotic burst of scrap metal that clings to the wall like a genetically altered giant spider. “Generally what I do is build things that have a unit,” says Larsen. “The unit gets… MORE >
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Roger Shimomura: An American Knockoff
Studio 360 The Scene: Kansas City By Laura Spencer Published February 27, 2012 Seventy years ago, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This action, just a few months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, forced an estimated 120,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps. Kansas-based artist Roger Shimomura was one of them. A young child at the time, the memories of barbed wire and guard towers have influenced his artwork ever since. Shimomura’s paintings are featured as part of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery exhibition Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter (in Washington DC through… MORE >
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Robert Lobe’s rural Repoussé
Embellishing the manicured landscape that surrounds the U.S. Geological Survey Building, in Reston, Virginia, an imposing metallic figure depicts a conglomeration of rocks and trees, leaning this way and that, yet bound together by nature’s timeless force. You might say the figure is a geologic survey in itself; it is a story told by natural elements found just below the Appalachian Trail in the woods of the Kittatinny Ridge in Sussex County, New Jersey. On the expansive government lawn in Virginia, the sculpture links the organic with the manmade, harmonizing the building’s natural setting with its horizontal geometry. The artist… MORE >
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Rock, Metal, Sculpture: Robert Lobe’s Imprint on Prospect Park
Throughout this summer and fall, the grounds surrounding Prospect Park’s Boathouse will feature a sculptural installation by the New York-based artist Robert Lobe (b. 1945). It is the ideal setting for Lobe’s work, which takes inspiration from shapes and textures found in nature. These Lobe studies in particular were inspired by the woods in Northern New Jersey, near a section of the Appalachian Trail where he creates most of his works amidst the boulders and trees. For years, he has encased trees and rocks in sheets of malleable aluminum. Through countless mallet strikes, a pneumatic air compressor, and a variation… MORE >
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Robert Lobe found his California vibe
Robert Lobe’s sculpture Butterfly overshadows the pen-and-ink works on paper on the wall in the background. Robert Lobe has been to California many times. But the month-long visit for his residency at the Luz Art Institute in Encinitas has been different, he says. “I think I understand the California thing for the first time,” says Lobe, who grew up in Cleveland, graduated from Oberlin College in 1967, went to graduate school at Hunter College and has lived in New York ever since. “There is a different sense of time, a kind of exuberant mood, which is also different than New… MORE >
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Preview: Erik Benson
Erik Benson’s paintings are quiet commentaries on our architectural world. His works critique uniformity and gentrification in American neighborhoods. In an ArtNews review, Christopher French observed, “Erik Benson represents a persuasive, dystopian take on the American landscape. In his paintings on canvas and paper, the normalcy of suburban views dominated by edifices of glass and steel is rudely interrupted-marked by decay or overwhelmed by ominous emissions suggestive of pollution or explosion.” Benson employs a flat, shape-based technique to deliver an atmospheric feeling of loneliness. Using an X-ACTO knife, he cuts shapes out of acrylic paint, which he has allowed to… MORE >
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Ming Fay: Jungle Tango
THE Magazine By Jan Adlmann September, 2008 Oscar Wilde notoriously maintained that “the first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible,” and Chinese artist Ming Fay unquestionably pursues Wilde’s directive, fabricating entangling, teeming, madly exotic jungle environments out of the most mundane, flimsy materials like papier-mâché and wire, urethane foam, lurid, glistening paint. Enveloping viewers in his looping lianas, bobbling strange fruits, and succulent seedpods, peeing incubi and succubi, and other unsettling fleurs du mal the artist has created various mock-organic ecosystems, expressionistic environments that emanate a feverish kind of coiled energy, “an edgy, Darwinian tension,” in… MORE >
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The Ways of Nature
SF Journal North By Kim Russo September 5, 2008 The popularity of organic produce is due, in part, to the rise of genetically modified (GMO) foods over the past decade. In a country like the United States, where labeling of GMO foods is not required, it is likely that all but the most diligent organic consumers in America are buying and swallowing GMO products every day. Genetic engineering has allowed scientists to create plants that produce human insulin and soybeans that won’t die even when drenched in Roundup. Charles Amtzen at Cornell University is working on “edible vaccines” placed genetically… MORE >
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Unnatural Nature
In his fourth solo exhibition at C. Grimaldis Gallery, The Nature of Things, veteran sculptor John Ruppert continues his ongoing conversation with geological forms and natural forces, while adding his less-exhibited photography and video to the mix. Ruppert’s known for his elegant metalwork and exceptional reproductions of natural objects, particularly pumpkins and splintered wood, and his current exhibition is overtly Zen. Concealed from the street with two large shades over the front window, which serve to obscure the bustling, unpredictable outdoor distractions from the calm gallery contents, The Nature of Things is an enclave of calm on North Charles Street. At the front of… MORE >
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Where Money Grows on Trees
Utopia; paradise; Shangri-la. Abundance. Lush tropical forest. Grounds For Sculpture, with its fantastical artwork, opulent gardens and peacocks strutting their stuff, is a nice place to site a utopia. And artist Ming Fay has done just that. Canutopia, a name derived from the words “canopy” and “utopia,” fills the new East Gallery with the fruits of abundance, fanciful shapes, colors and forms. Given the recent spike in visitation at the Hamilton-based museum, you probably have been there recently. If not you will be treated to new wings, acreage and artwork. Having survived the economic downturn with an ever-changing cast of… MORE >
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The Healing Arts: The Restoring Power of Imagination
Art is a source of restoration and renewal, even as we age. Models of successful aging highlight evidence of creative expression as key to health and well-being. Octogenarian Jimmy Mirikitani, resident of New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, had his first one person show at the age of 86; his story is a testimony to life-long wounds from the trauma of war, personal tragedy and loss, and, ultimately, the healing power of art. In a recent report on older adult artists, a 72-year-old homeless artist was quoted as saying, “Art is the only thing that’s left in the world.” For octogenarian… MORE >
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Jimmy’s ‘Cats’: From World War II to Sept. 11… and Beyond
“I hereby formally renounce my United States nationality and all of its rights and privileges…” — Jimmy Mirikitani Sacramento-born artist Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani was 22 at the outbreak of World War II when he was separated from his sister and placed in an internment camp. He was one of the 120,000 people imprisoned by the U.S. government because of their Japanese ancestry. Two-thirds of them, Mirikitani included, were American citizens. Mirikitani spent nearly four years in Tule Lake, Calif., a high-security camp where those considered “disloyal” to America were placed. This betrayal by the U.S. government led him to… MORE >
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A Different Kind of
The Cats of Mirikitani, a humble and profound documentary by skilled story weaver Linda Hattendorf, has traveled the world and been screened for thousands of people at festivals and other venues. On February 28 at 7 p.m., the Lawrence Arts Center hosts the film that has left such an indelible mark on all those it touches. The screening coincides with Shadows of Minidoka: Paintings and Collections of Roger Shimomura andDrawings of Jimmy Mirikitani; both exhibitions continue through March 12, and Shimomura and Hattendorf will be at the screening for a discussion with the audience on Monday. The central narrative of The Cats of Mirikitani is about… MORE >
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The Art of Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani tells a store of displacement, hardship, and endurance
A story of displacement, hardship, and endurance is told through a small exhibition of outsider art by Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani. Born in Sacramento, California, in 1920 and raised from the age of four in Hiroshima, Japan, Mirikitani had only briefly returned to the United States when war broke out between the two countries. In 1942, he was incarcerated, along with thousands of other Americans of Japanese descent, in a harsh and desolate internment camp in northern California. During the decades following the war, Mirikitani worked in a factory and then as a cook, before landing, jobless and homeless, on the… MORE >
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Two Takes on the Truth: A hoax about a hoax and art about an artist
The Hoax★ Directed by Lasse Hallstrom Written by William Wheeler, With Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden, Stanley Tucci, and Julie Delpy. The Cats of Mirikitani★★★ Directed by Linda Hattendorf There are ways both official and unofficial to describe “the movies.” There’s the new releases the industry decides to push in the malls, and then there’s everything else, which we’re obliged to root out for ourselves. A schoolteacher I know in the wilds of Argentina selects and projects DVDs on a regular basis, and some of the stuff he shows—old experimental shorts, recent features by Abbas… MORE >
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Liberating an Interned Soul
What a deceptively innocent title for such a tragic, affecting affair. “The Cats of Mirikitani” is, quite simply, breathtaking — one of the most surprising and unshakable documentaries I can recall. Constructed around a story more far-fetched and coincidental than anything a writer of fiction would dare conceive, and brimming with a sense of anger and hope against all odds, this is a film that stays with you. Watching “The Cats of Mirikitani” a day after this week’s Academy Awards (though it made its world premiere at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival), it struck me that this documentary is every… MORE >
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The Cats of Mirikitani (2006) Painting Through the Pain
The title may suggest a wildlife documentary, but “The Cats of Mirikitani” is entirely, vibrantly human. When, early in 2001, the New York filmmaker Linda Hattendorf befriends the homeless artist who works beneath the awning of a grocery store near her SoHo apartment, she has no way of knowing where the friendship will lead — nor how their shared experience of one national tragedy will sharpen the legacy of another more than half a century earlier. Born in Sacramento in 1920, raised in Hiroshima and interned in an American camp after he returned to the United States to avoid Japanese… MORE >
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Living Nine Lives to the Fullest
THE CATS OF MIRIKITANI Documentaries show us that poverty and marginalization can dim but never extinguish the creative spark. Linda Hattendorf’s new film examines the life and work of Jimmy Mirikitani, an octogenarian artist living on the streets of New York City. It joins such uplifting works as Born Into Brothels (about kids from the slums of Calcutta who become photographers), The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (a natural naturalist in San Francisco) and In the Realms of the Unreal (a Chicago janitor whose 15,000-page illustrated novel was discovered as he lay dying). Hunched, soft-spoken, clear-headed and opinionated, Mirikitani had… MORE >
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Taos filmmaker helps bring Mirikitani’s art to light
Artist Jimmy Mirikitani was born in California in 1920 and spent much of his youth in Hiroshima, Japan. He returned to America in 1937 to avoid fighting in Japan’s war against China, and to study art, saying of his thoughts at the time, “I’m not soldier boy. I’m an artist.” Filmmaker Linda Hattendorf, who lives in Taos and New York, began by recording a few interactions with Mirikitani on the street in Soho, N.Y., in January 2001, and as Hattendorf and Mirikitani become friends, a film on his work organically evolved into “a chronicle of the deep wounds of war… MORE >
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Fosberg’s Follies
Nothing in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s oracular 2010 Biennial Exhibition impressed me more than the work of Los Angeles painter Lesley Vance. Now her work – sadly, only two pieces – figures in a group show just opened at Anthony Meier Fine Arts. Vance’s untitled canvas (accompanied by an unrelated, untitled watercolor) typifies her approach to working away from a still life subject or photograph. The paint strokes and scraping down in this picture seem to peel apart a dark surface to let in light from behind. Vance distills painting’s power to evoke tangibility while keeping illusionistic volume… MORE >
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Canutopia
Introduction The parallels are striking, the symbolism serendipitous. Grounds for Sculpture, today a lush dreamscape of a sculpture park, vividly imagined and painstakingly built by artist Seward Johnson on the barren site of the abandoned State Fairgrounds, opened its gates in 1992. Exactly 20 years later it dedicates the opening of a voluminous East Gallery by filing it with the phantasmal flora and fauna creations from the life work of the incomparable artist Ming Fay. Fay calls his spirited installation Canutopia… Can-utopia is as much a question as a title, and one just as aptly asked of its honored… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE: Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani: Drawings
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani: Drawings. Jimmy Mirikitani, born in California in 1920, spent much of his youth in Hiroshima, Japan. He returned to America in 1937 to avoid fighting in Japan’s war against China, and to study art (“I’m not soldier boy. I’m an artist,” Mirikitani said of his thoughts at the time). At the start of the war, he was living in Seattle with his sister when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. He was fishing at a pier when news of war reached the mainland. “An… MORE >
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Dress to Transgress
“An association lurked in every fold: each fall of lace and gleam of embroidery was like a letter in the record of her past. “ –Edith Wharton,The House of Mirth The soundtrack of artist Nancy Youdelman’s childhood was the whir of a Singer sewing machine—the sounds of her mother stitching, hemming, and seaming dress after dress for Nancy and her sisters. Youdelman’s recollections of sorting buttons, winding ribbon, and toying with notions have informerd her work, which explores how memory is bound up in clothing and other personal belongings. Using found fabrics and materials, the sculptor creates objects that… MORE >
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Haiku Reviews
HuffPost Arts’ Haiku Reviews is a monthly feature where invited critics review exhibitions and performances in short form. Some will be in the traditional Haiku form of 5x7x5 syllables, others might be a sonnet and others might be more free-form. This month, George Heymont, Laurence Vittes and Peter Frank give their quick takes on performing and visual arts. Lance Letscher must be one of America’s most truly dedicated, even obsessive collagists, and that’s saying a lot. He covers his available surfaces – which in this case include an array of books – with thick webs of paper bits, every… MORE >
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Electronic Artwork: Jason Salavon’s computer-based pieces open at Eight Modern
When an artist works with computers, how does he coose what to use? “I’m pretty agnostic about tools: I use everything from Hollywood-style 3-D software to custom software to output technologies,” Jason Salavon told the Journalin a telephone interview. “I’m a classical conceptual artist. I let the idea come first.” A show of Salavon’s computer-based art opens today at Eight Modern gallery on Delgado Street. He is an assistant professor of visual arts at the University of Chicago, where he is also the only member of the humanities faculty with a dual appointment in the Computation Institute. Born in… MORE >
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Rebecca Shore, Eight Modern
Some of Rebecca Shore’s sprightly paintings read as quirky compendiums of found objects, others as fantastical diagrams for elaborate circuitry. Heavily influenced by Chicago Imagists like Christina Ramberg and Ray Yoshida, Shore collects objects from many different sources and catalogues them in silhouette, against vividly colored or neutral grounds. Thus we find a brassiere sharing space with a man’s loafer, a golden key, a goblet, and a curving pipe. The temptation was to try to make sense out of why these particular items are arrayed the way they are—in rigorous rows or more haphazard alignments—but the longer one stared… MORE >
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Artist Statement
I had a very anxious and harried early childhood. Drawing and making things was my way of creating order and having purpose. By age seven I knew that I wanted to be an artist. I started like most children with coloring, drawing and then sewing and building. At age four I got a small Singer sewing machine for Christmas and started making doll clothes. I also got a carpentry set that same year and made birdhouses. By the second grade I made some of my school clothes. In elementary school I made the obligatory reports and notebooks and they were… MORE >
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Review: Edda Renouf, Ramona Sakiestewa, and Marie Watt: Redefining the Canvas
Walking into the gallery space that is off to the left upon entering Eight Modern, where Marie Watt is showing her work, is like stepping back in time. Watt uses old woolen blankets as canvases for sewn-on images that evoke a sense of nostalgia. Watt’s work, along with that of Edda Renouf and Ramona Sakiestewa, is featured as part of Redefining the Canvas, a show that erases and reinvents the distinctions between painting, quilting, and weaving. Watt’s tartan plaid blanket titled Stadium: Jim Thorpe and Other Relationsis a complete narrative suggesting significant events of Thorpe’s career as an athlete through… MORE >
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Warp and Heft
Ramona Sakiestewa is about as clear and forthright and sweet as any person could hope to meet or be. Which explains in part why her woven abstract paintings, often devoid of anything figurative, narrative, or perceptible, have appealed to so many people: as nonrepresentational as they are, they’re beautiful but full of sinew and depth, elegant, straightforward but inherently, deceptively complex. And in a way—much like Sakiestewa herself—almost defiant and reluctant at being put into a box. (How, after all, can anyone delimit the range of someone who, after teaching herself how to weave based on the writings of anthropologists,… MORE >
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Living: Lifestyle, Design, Home
With pieces ranging from 80 to more than 100 years old, the assemblage of deer and mountain goat antlers on display in writer and art critic Jan Adlmann’s north-side Zocalo home transforms his small study into a space he calls “the jagdzimmer,” or hunting room. Mounted on hand-carved plaques commemorating the date and location of each hunt, the antlers, aka Tyrolean hunting trophies, are a common feature in Austrian and Bavarian classic interiors. For Adlmann—who’s never shot a thing—they’re an expression of his family heritage. The first set came from his Austrian-born grandfather. The others he has acquired over the… MORE >
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The Wife Aquatic: Fay Ku isn’t dead, she just sleeps with the fishes
Double Entendre, Fay Ku’s exhibition at Eight Modern, is a crowd-pleaser. Or maybe just a crowd-teaser. Or maybe I’m a pervert. Whichever it is, I was left wanting more, both for the beauty of the art and, at only six drawings, the brevity of the show. The unadorned figurative works nimbly fulfill the trifecta of contemporary drawing: they are well-crafted, inscrutable and sort of naughty. I found myself nodding my head at her line work, scratching my head at her motives and shaking my head at her lascivious subjects. It is obvious that Ku can draw, but her craft never… MORE >
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Nine Lives: Jimmy Mirikitani’s Journey
A Little more than a decade ago, filmmaker Linda Hattendorf and homeless Japanese American artist Tsutomu “Jimmy” Mirikitani first crossed paths in New York City. Hattendorf was immediately taken aback by Mirikitani’s colorful, expressionistic crayon-and-ink drawings of cats, and she began to follow him around the streets of New York with a camera—until Sept. 11, 2001, when those same streets came to resemble Mirikitani’s family’s hometown of Hiroshima in the aftermath of World War II. In The Cats of Mirikitani, Hattendorf’s 2006 directorial debut, audiences learn that Mirikitani’s devotion to his art began when he was 25, while interned as… MORE >
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Recommendations: Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani
Coming through an almost child-like, yet sophisticated rendering of imagery executed in ink and crayon, the cat’s eyes peeking just above the top of a persimmon-laden table in “Hiding Cat with Persimmons” are so fully realized and carefully observed that they become the soul of the drawing. Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani conveys compelling artistry through terse, simple gestures. In “Sea Fish and Coral” the fish itself is little more than an oblong series of concentric lines, perhaps even hastily drawn, yet full of grace. So soulful is the face of his “Tiger Cat,” it registers a human-like intelligence behind its… MORE >
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Jimmy Mirikitani’s Nine Lives, at Eight Modern
Jimmy Mirikitani could probably teach a workshop on the intricacies of crayon-color mixing and its affinity with Bic pen marks. Really—his crayon-color mixing is incredible boasting layers upon layer of pigment that transform into coral or fish scales. His show of work on view at Eight Modern, 231 Delgado Street, through August 15th, follows on a documentary movie made about his life, The Cats of Mirikitani. It’s a subtle film about his life and the complexities of being a Japanese-American of 91 who experienced internment in the U.S. during World War II, and as a homeless New Yorker, witnessed the… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Roger Shimomura: An American Knockoff
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Roger Shimomura: An American Knockoff. Shimomura’s exhibition probes what it means to be an “other” in America, presenting fourteen paintings (all self-portraits) that skillfully blend anger and absurdity. Shimomura’s work draws heavily on his own experiences as an Asian American – in which he is often perceived and treated as a foreigner in his own country. InAn American Knockoff, the artist surrounds himself with or subsumes his own likeness into iconic representations of American and Asian popular culture. Shimomura’s distinctive round glasses and salt-and-pepper goatee appear… MORE >
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Recommendation: Nancy Youdelman at Eight Modern
For more than four decades, Nancy Youdelman has exemplified the feminist art movement’s enduring impact on the course of post-World War II art. One of fifteen students led by Judy Chicago in the establishment of the nation’s first feminist art program at California State University, Fresno, in 1970, Youdelman continued her art studies at CalArts’s Feminist Art Program, during which she participated in the seminal exhibition “Womanhouse” in 1972. In the intervening years, she has defined a singular artistic vocabulary that internalizes the Pattern & Decoration movement’s innovations to extend the use of “female technologies” inclusive of costume design, sewing, flower pressing,… MORE >
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Outside the Realm Review
One of the hallmarks of Nancy Youdelman’s work is its honest, personal accessibility, which gives her mixed media sculptures and reliefs a captivating, self-sufficient beauty. But while Youdelman, who teaches art at Fresno State, intently and modestly continues to hone her craft, the art world has begun to focus renewed attention on her significant contributions to the feminist art movement of the 1970s. Youdelman was recently included in the 2009 exhibition and catalogue A Studio of Their Own: The Legacy of the Fresno Feminist Experiment. In 1970 Judy Chicago led fifteen students (including Youdelman) in the founding of the nation’s first… MORE >
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East is West: Roger Shimomura and Asian-American Identity
If he were depicted with Asian features, as oppsed to Anglo or European ones, Superman might be taken for a foreign national. But such an uncommon Superman could actually be Asian American, and that is the case with Roger Shimomura’s self portrait as the Man of Steel in his painting American in Disguise. Shimomura’s new exhibit at Eight Modern, An American Knockoff, is a pointed commentary on the stereotypes and racism pervading American attitudes toward members of our nation’s own citizenry, including Japanese Americans. An American Knockoffpokes fun at the stereotypes and might just cause you to question your assumptions.… MORE >
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Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani: Drawings
The Story of the artist Jimmy Mirikitani reads like a work of fiction by Haruki Murakami, except Murakami did not invent this tale. Jimmy was born Tsutomu Mirikitani in Sacramento, California in 1920, and was therefore an American citizen. However, he had spent his youth in Hiroshima, only coming back to America when he was eighteen in order to attend art school. When America declared was on Japan after Pearl Harbor, Mirikitani and 120,000 other Japanese-Americans were swept up and taken away to internment camps all over the Western United States. At that time, Mirikitani was living with his sister… MORE >
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American Original
“How long have you lived in this country?” This seemingly innocuous conversational gambit carries a real sting for Roger Shimomura—because the answer is, “All of my life. I was born here.” And all of his life, the award-winning artist has wrestled with a feeling of “otherness” because of his Japanese-American heritage, a feeling he translates as a sense that non-Asians consider him an “American knock-off,” a less-than-acceptable copy of an American, a foreigner in his own country. He’s memorialized the stereotypes—and the sadness and rage they engender—in a show of 14 “self-portraits” called “An American Knockoff” that opens today at… MORE >
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Profile: Celeste Roberge
A SCULPTOR AT LARGE: Working with the “stuff of the earth,” this artist –teacher creates objects that amaze and provoke. The concepts for her sculpture, Celeste Roberge explains, “begin with seeing something in the world—like a rock, a sofa, a quarry, a type of seaweed, a piece of rusted metal—where the presence of matter and materiality is dominant.” From there, the process becomes wonderfully obsessive and often transformational. Take Roberge’s granite sofa. This remarkable object of leisure, paradoxically made of stone, was inspired by a Grecian sofa attributed to famed neoclassicist architect and woodcarver Samuel McIntire (1757–1811). The sculptor came… MORE >
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Grecian Sofa Memorialized in Stone
A Milbridge sculptor is carving a pink granite version of renowned New England architect and woodcarver Samuel McIntire’s “Grecian Sofa.” The “Granite Sofa” is internationally known artist Celeste Roberge’s attempt to create a monument to the McIntire’s 1805 piece. Roberge, a Biddeford native, spends summers in South Portland and is a professor of sculpture at the University of Florida. Once finished, “Granite Sofa” will be available for viewing — and sitting — at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. The piece will probably be finished in January. Furniture experts consider McIntire a leading force in creative design during the Federal… MORE >
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Celeste Roberge, Cairn, 1998
Anodized steel, hand-selected river rock from the Truckee River Dimensions: 54” x 58” x 40” Location: Front Entrance to the NMA Acquisition: Courtesy of the Artist and Funded by the City of Reno and the Nevada Museum of Art Volunteers In Art Cairn, the most enduring of all the NMA sculptures, is popular with all age groups. It has greeted visitors to both the old and the new museum for many years. It is unique in that it is a “site specific” sculpture, created just for the NMA in 1998 by artist Celeste Roberge. The word cairn means “mound of stones erected… MORE >
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Artist-in-Residence: Roger Shimomura (2012-2013)
Roger Shimomura’s paintings, prints, and theatre pieces address sociopolitical issues of ethnicity. He was born in Seattle, Washington and spent two years of his early childhood in Minidoka (Idaho), one of ten concentration camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. Shimomura received a B.A. degree from the University of Washington, Seattle, and an M.F.A. from Syracuse University, New York. He has had over 135 solo exhibitions of paintings and prints, and has presented his experimental theatre pieces at such venues as the Franklin Furnace, New York City, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. He is… MORE >
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Review: Amy Winehouse at Steven Zevitas Gallery
David X. Levine was still installing his works on paper at Steven Zevitas Gallery, organizing several small colored-pencil drawings into an installation, when I came through late last week. But his big pieces were up and lighted. The show is called “Amy Winehouse,’’ and many of Levine’s works reference popular culture; he seems to be channeling the energy of particular figures. In the large works, these include the late Suzanne Pleshette, the whiskey-voiced actress who played Bob Newhart’s wife on “The Bob Newhart Show,’’ and beat poet John Wieners. “Suzanne Pleshette’’ is an ambitious and obsessive array of three nearly… MORE >
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14 Must-See Painting Shows: October 2012
October 2012 has proven to be an extraordinary month for the medium of paint. There are dozens of strong exhibitions on view throughout the country, which made culling together this list particularly challenging. Selecting only ten shows proved to be too hard of a cut, so this month’s list has been expanded to fourteen shows — it could have easily been doubled. It has been a long time since the art world has bought into the idea of a unified “-ism” that captures the aesthetic aims of a significant group of artists; plural-ism has been the go to term since… MORE >
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David X Levine Gets Personal at Eight Modern
An exhibition of drawings by David X Levine opened October 19th at Eight Modern, the gallery’s second show of his work. The first, She Kept Her Heart Parked On A Hill, which paid homage to music of the 20th-century, happened in 2010. Using Levine’s signature colored pencil on paper, She Kept Her Heart Parked On A Hillshowed bulbous shapes that escaped anthropomorphizing save a cheeky personality hidden within the meticulous Prismacolor strokes. Miles(2007) uses two colors: tan and brown. The background is tan and the brown bulging oval takes up almost half of the picture plane. Although the drawing is… MORE >
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Now Featuring Siobhan McBride
Siobhan McBride’s paintings catch nondescript environments in moments that seem to be a pause, like a breath of air right before or after the action happens. But they’re noting like snapshots, as horizons peel back, walls fade away and strange light illuminates the scene. Instead, it is McBride’s process that seems to build this sense of potential release; prone, as she puts it, to distraction, the paintings are visions and revisions that condense McBride’s sense of time, narrative and diversion into a single image. — MH: What is your interest in transitional spaces? Many of your interiors seem to be studios, and many… MORE >
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Siobhan McBride: Long Letter
A good storyteller knows how to pull elements from a mix of sources to create a well-rounded, collage-like image in the minds of those who listen. Siobhan McBride, the next Roswell Artist-in-Residence who will exhibit her show, “Long Letter,” at the Roswell Museum and Art Center Aug. 10-Sept. 23, creates the same story-telling effect in her artwork. The RAiR exhibition will be the first time McBride shows her work solo. It is also a break from tradition for an artist who typically shows her work along the East Coast. It is no surprise that elements of good creative writing have… MORE >
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A Sense of Possibility
Lauren Tresp, spokesperson at the Delgado Street gallery Eight Modern, has described artist Siobhan McBride’s gouache paintings as having an enigmatic potentiality. “Like a deep breath before a cataclysmic moment, or the sight of a storm on the horizon, McBride’s gouache paintings are pregnant with wonder and introspection,” she wrote in a press release for the show opening today. “Though her compositions are unpopulated by figures, the potential of their presence is felt. The artist’s choice of show title, ‘Strong Wings May Exist,’ reflects this sense of possibility.” The artist herself does not reject the analogy. “I saw a… MORE >
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Siobhan McBride: Strong Winds May Exist
Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Siobhan McBride: Strong Winds May Exist. Like a deep breath before a cataclysmic moment, or the sight of a storm on the horizon, McBride’s gouache paintings are pregnant with wonder and introspection. Though her compositions are unpopulated by figures, the potential of their presence is felt. The artist’s choice of show title, Strong Winds May Exist,reflects this sense of possibility. “I saw it (a road sign saying, “Strong Winds May Exist”) while driving, and it struck me as very strange. Uncertain, somewhat magical, not the natural language of road signs,… MORE >
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Art in Review: Siobhan McBride: Strong Winds May Exist
Imagine seeing moments from different realities in a single picture. Or think of snippets of memories pieced together to create peculiar juxtapositions of mundane objects situated in seemingly normal surroundings. Dream imagery? This is what comes to mind looking at Siobhan McBride’s gouache paintings in Strong Winds May Exist, her inaugural solo exhibit at Eight Modern, which showcases her work from 2010 to 2012. In 22 diminutive works on paper mounted on wood panels—the majority of which are no larger than 12 x 16 inches—McBride’s work imports numerous narratives. Some scenes feel familiar while others are a bit skewed… MORE >
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Siobhan McBride
Siobhan McBride makes dreamy paintings. Not heartthrob-dreamy — although some of them are — but rather “am-I-awake?”-dreamy. It’s not always obvious what’s going on in “Strong Winds May Exist.” Like the show’s title, the works themselves occupy an unpredictable, edgy place between sentient and subconscious activity. The couple dozen paintings on display are uniformly rendered in gouache, and they achieve an opaque, wonderfully textured thickness that adds a dream-like filter to the already strange scenes. The works are modestly proportioned, but their petite dimensions are rich in provocative imagery that incorporates real and imagined elements. The puzzling circumstances of… MORE >
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Santa Fe’s Local Characters
Beyond the turquoise clichés and New Age philosophizing, T+L finds the key to Santa Fe in the characters we meet along the way. “I raise the strawberry because it wears its heart on its sleeve. Its seeds are on the outside! The strawberry has nothing to hide! It is the perfect size. It is not too big; neither is it too small. Nature has created it so that it would fit perfectly in the mouth.” If you’re wondering where this juicy conversation is happening, let me assure you there is only one possible place in the universe: Santa Fe, New Mexico.… MORE >
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Crystal Bridges unveils new outdoor installation
The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s latest outdoor installation — a chaise lounge made of stainless steel and stones — “isn’t that big, but weighs a lot,” said artist Celeste Roberge of her creation titled Chaise Gabion. Gabions, from the Italian word gabbione, are cages, cylinders or boxes filled with rocks, concrete or sometimes sand and soil that are used in civil engineering, road building and military applications. Roberge has been working with different kinds of rocks in various shapes since the 1980s. “I like to use them in unusual ways,” she said. She developed a prototype for Chaise… MORE >
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THE Magazine – Siobhan McBride: Strong Winds May Exist
When we’re inside, we’re outside When it’s night, it’s day. And wherever Siobhan McBride takes us—underwater, into a blizzard, inside an aquarium, high above the earth—she gives us gorgeous light. The exhibition of her work at Eight Modern presents twenty-two of McBride’s blended scenes from 2010 to 2012, all created in gouache on paper on panel. The pictures range in size from five by four inches to eighteen by twenty-four inches and there is much drama within these spaces. Each work combines mini-views, or even snippets of views, aligned or superimposed or merely there. The composite images often have the… MORE >
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Siobhan McBride: Never While You’re Sleeping
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PRESS RELEASE – Nancy Youdelman: Dogs Are Forever
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Nancy Youdelman: Dogs Are Forever. Youdelman’s third solo show at Eight Modern reflects the continued refinement of her unique, highly memorable method and style. Youdelman’s mixed media sculptures and reliefs use vintage clothing as the foundation for sculptures incorporating vintage snapshots, love letters, buttons, pins, and organic elements such as leaves, twigs and flowers. The artist continues to add depth to her already significant legacy as a pioneering feminist artist through her accessible, honest exploration of the personal objects that interconnect touchstone themes like love, mortality… MORE >
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Albuquerque Journal North – For the Love of Dogs
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Santa Fe Reporter – And They Call it Puppy Love
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My Modern Met – 4,000 Pounds of Rocks Fill a Human-Shaped Steel Frame
Florida-based artist Celeste Roberge is fascinated with creating art where there is an intersection of geological time and human time. She identifies the layers of history and memory that exist within everything, from people, to furniture, to natural materials found in the world around us. The artist says she creates sculptures where “the presence of matter and materiality is dominant,” and where combinations of fleeting human existence stand in direct harmony with the steady and enduring powers of nature. Rising Cairns is a commanding sculpture where Roberge welded a steel grid into a rough likeliness of her own body, but much… MORE >
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THE Magazine – Dogs Are Forever
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Visual Art Source – Nancy Youdelman
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PRESS RELEASE – Fay Ku: Asa Nisa Masa
Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Fay Ku: Asa Nisa Masa. Ku stages mythic tableaus of transformation and tension performed by young women (and the occasional boy). The refinement and subtlety of Ku’s technique offer an arresting contrast to the raw psychological charge of the scenes she depicts. Ku is inspired by what she calls the “residues” of human culture. “Problematic relationships and issues of socialization are central themes in my work: stories, myths and things witnessed inspire me,” Ku says. “I never have any pre-conceived notion of what the work will look like, and I never… MORE >
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Santa Fe Reporter – Half and Half
Fay Ku’s creations. “It’s a recurring motif I’ve done in the past,” Ku says of her mythical, half human/half beasts. She adds that the creatures aren’t based on a specific person, but rather on an amalgamation of innate human values and ideas—an avatar of sorts. “Just like video game characters can portray different aspects of themselves each time you revisit them,” Ku explains, her protagonists display different personalities. “That one is still a little bit mysterious for me,” Ku tells SFR of “Birdfight” (pictured). The former Santa Fe Art Institute resident adds that the piece is also an observation on… MORE >
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Santa Fe New Mexican – Mnemonic Play: Fay Ku
Fay Ku’s exhibition Asa Nisa Masa, which opens at Eight Modern on Friday, May 31, takes its title from Fellini’s 8 ½. In the film, protagonist Guido Anselmi, an Italian movie director, remembers magic words he learned as a child to make a painting come alive at midnight —asa nisi masa. In the course of chanting the phrase to herself, Ku remembered nisias nisaand decided to keep the title based on her altered memory. “It’s mostly an emotional reference,” Ku told Pasatiempo from Brooklyn, where she is based. “When I recently watched 8 ½., I hadn’t seen it for seven… MORE >
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Monique van Genderen
It was high time for Monique van Genderen’s first New York solo show. While the Los Angeles-based artist has become known for large-scale wall pieces such as those she created in Savannah and Philadelphia, this exhibition presented seven works on canvas (84 by 78 or 72 by 48 inches). Each of the nonobjective paintings seems to put forth a specific argument or to make a statement. These bold, self-assured works propose that while things may get a little messy, there is no need to worry, because the artist knows what she is doing. The compositions are asymmetrical, expanding out from… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Jason Salavon: Chance Animals
A leading innovator in new media art, Salavon uses self-designed software to pull images and data from the internet and mass media and transforms them into digital prints, videos and installations. Salavon’s work reframes our experience of the overwhelming abundance of communal media, while revealing both familiar and unexpected patterns in a seeming chaos of information. In their most recent issue, Art + Auctionselected Salavon as one of 50 Under 50: The Next Most Collectible Artists. “Salavon’s works illuminate how new technology infiltrates our culture and consciousness. But it’s his talent for conceptual clarity, matched by an affinity for formal… MORE >
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THE Magazine – Fay Ku: Asa Nisa Masa
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Art Slant – After Dark
Asa nisa masa, a phrase from Fellini’s 8½, is an incantation recalled from the childhood of the film’s protagonist, Guido. In the film we see a young Guido utter the phrase repeatedly while wildly jumping and flapping his arms in the hopes of summoning a painting on his bedroom wall to come to life. The current exhibition on view at Eight Modern gallery by Fay Ku owes its title to Guido’s memorable hymn. When you remove the second syllable of each word in the phrase asa nisa masa, what is left is the word “anima”, a word used by Carl… MORE >
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New American Paintings – Fay Ku: Asa Nisa Masa
Fay Ku’s solo exhibition Asa Nisa Masa at Eight Modern in Santa Fe features delicately executed graphite, ink and watercolor works inspired by her memories, experiences and relationships as a result of her upbringing in white suburbia as the child of Chinese immigrants. Through her use of subtly articulated line and negative space, Ku references East Asian artistic traditions, while her focus on figurative representation through a predominantly female-centric subject matter, suggests a more contemporary Western perspective. Her often-surreal visual narratives borrow from myth and folklore to explore the intersection of personal, social and cultural tension. The exhibition title is… MORE >
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Art + Auction – 50 Under 50: The Next Most Collectible Artists
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University of Chicago Magazine – Data Sets
“Wow, it’s such a tiny screen,” says Jason Salavon, peering at the old Macintosh he used to create his first digital artwork. It was 1993, and he was a studio-art major at the University of Texas at Austin. With that computer—now shelved in his Hyde Park Art Center studio—and a dot-matrix printer, he produced a 300-page book of repeating black-and-white patterns. Photoshop was still in its infancy, and there were “no real tools” to create this sort of artwork, so Salavon, a computer-science minor, designed his own. Intrigued by the idea of “having software autonomously aid and produce work almost… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – New Works by Katherine Lee, with Fire, Flags and Sacrifice
Lee’s third solo exhibition at Eight Modern includes ten new oil and spray paint paintings, a continuation of her Exteriorsseries. Though unpopulated–at least by the living–each of these architectural settings are charged with possibility and suspended action. Elements such as still-smoldering embers in a disheveled yard or flames reflected in a storefront window open the works to countless potential narratives. Lee’s title, With Fire, Flags, and Sacrifice,evokes a sense of ceremony and ritual, and touches on the air of loss that pervades the paintings. “There is more than function and decoration in the objects and creations we fashion,” the artist… MORE >
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Previews: New Works by Katherine Lee, with Fire, Flags and Sacrifice
Katherine Lee, who received her bachelor of fine arts at the College of Santa Fe in 2008, made waves several years ago with her exhibition Animal Violence and Topless Women Eating Jam, a grotesque yet intriguing show of drawings that garnered mixed reviews—but most certainly provoked a reaction. Lee’s upcoming solo show at Eight Modern is a return to painting, her usual medium, and unnerving architectural landscapes, her usual subject. In Exterior 23 (Overgrown Domestic Scene)a walled-in back yard shows clues of life—a still smoldering fire pit, a plastic table and chairs, an empty clothesline—but the landscape beyond resembles what… MORE >
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Visual Art Source – Katherine Lee
Meticulous brushwork and intelligently — if inexplicably — composed scenarios populate “New Works by Katherine Lee, Featuring Fire, Flags and Sacrifice.” Absent of any discernible narratives, Lee’s latest paintings are instead rife with ominous undertones, making their familiar-ness especially disorienting; the handful on view have a ghostly, just-vacated air. “Exterior 23,” with its clothesline and cinderblock fencing, seems at first like an ordinary backyard. But the rayless sky feels sinister, and the shabby fence encloses the yard like a crypt. The overgrown grass is a matted, dirty green carpet on which a plastic dining set is placed ignorantly but unignorably… MORE >
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Review: John Ruppert at the Kohl Gallery
There are elemental forces at work in John Ruppert’s work. In his exhibit at Washington College’s Kohl Gallery, on view through October 6, Ruppert investigates the moon, the sun, gravity, and the alchemy of fiery heat and metals, in short, the forces that made this earth and keep it going. A rock sits on the gallery floor side by side with its twin, a copy of itself cast in iron. Would you look at the shadowy concavities, craggy angles and weightiness of this rock as closely if it sat alone? Staged with its duplicate, it invites puzzling out the differences… MORE >
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Catalogue Essay: Oita’s Art Moment
In 1970, there were between 600 and 700 bamboo craftspeople making a living in Japan, creating items ranging from simple food steamers and chopsticks to flower baskets of extraordinary beauty and complexity. The world has changed much since 1970. Today less expensive bamboo objects imported from Southeast Asia have largely displaced locally made wares in Japanese shops. In Oita Prefecture, which for over one hundred years has boasted the largest concentration of bamboo craftspeople in all of Japan, the number of people working with bamboo has shrunk by two thirds. The Commerce, Industry, and Labor Department of the Oita Prefectural… MORE >
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Art + Auction – Exhibitions in Review, Monique van Genderen
The Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based painter is a master colorist who festishizes the brushstroke to striking effect. For this exhibition of recent paintings she opted for a kind of reverse working method. Instead of creating sketches and studies for a larger painting, van Genderen made the large work first and endeavored, on six smaller canvases, to recreate sections of that painterly abstraction that were as true to the original painting as possible. The small-scale “copies” could theoretically be reassembled to ape the original piece. Works were sold to major collectors in the United States and Canada, many of whom were faithful… MORE >
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Asahi Shimbun – Bamboo artist Tanabe follows family lineage to win global acclaim
At an exhibition in Tokyo last fall,world-renowned artist Shouchiku Tanabe told an audience that his life long experience of working with bamboo resonates within him and helps him craft the material into avant-garde art objects. “I try to have a conversation with bamboo, feel its pulse and create objects with concerted efforts. It is a theme of my art,” Tanabe told a packed gallery in October at the Wako department store in the capital’s Ginza district. Coming from a distinguished family of bamboo artists in Sakai, Osaka Prefecture, Tanabe’s name is known by collectors of Asian art around the world,… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Katherine Lee – Maps, Doors and Coffins: Locating Absence
TAI Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Maps, Doors and Coffins: Locating Absence, a body of work by Katherine Lee that explores relationships between location, presence and perception. Katherine Lee’s evocative new work extends beyond the oil paintings she is known for and encompasses hand-crafted objects. Since her last exhibition at TAI Modern, Lee developed the carpentry techniques necessary to craft traditional paneled doors from raw lumber and build classic wooden coffins with simple tools. She now presents a series of paintings and monotypes in conjunction with these doors and coffins. Each element offers its own investigation… MORE >
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THE Magazine – Preview: Maps, Doors and Coffins: Locating Absence
The exquisitely painted oils of Katherine Lee are the maps inthis exhibition. With images of grass or empty highways at night, familiar yetsolitary, and indicative of an uninhabited space, these works take on deepermeaning when paired with the hand-crafted coffins and wooden doors Leeconstructed. The coffins—explored artistically in many cultures but not oftenby Americans, who prefer to avoid reminders of death—were made by Lee for fivefamily members. Simply painted in black and embellished with skulls andflowers, quiet, not morbid, the coffins sit next to her wood doors, which mightbe the entrances or exits to offices from the past. There is… MORE >
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Pasatiempo – A matter of life and death: artist Katherine Lee
In her exhibition With Fire,Flags, and Sacrifice, which opened at Eight Modern in 2013, local artist Katherine Lee presented a body of work that spoke to the transient nature of human life in an intriguing way: by calling attention to its absence in compositions based on human-made environments such as a city street and an enclosed yard. Tension was created by the sense of actions having just occurred or about to occur. Her paintings have a surreal quality — there’s an implication that there’s a human presence in them somewhere just out of sight.Lee’s new work, which includes hand-crafted paneled… MORE >
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THE Magazine – Review – Maps, Doors and Coffins: Locating Absence
The limits of my language are the limits of my world. —Ludwig Wittgenstein FULL DISCLOSURE: I AM A LITTLE BIT IN LOVE WITH KATHERINE LEE. I mean,what’s not to love? She’s a delightful young woman, shy and whip smart, with greater talent and drive than any one person ought to be allowed to possess. (People like Lee make the rest of us look bad.) And her art is knockout. I also adore Margo Thoma and Jaquelin Loyd of TAI Modern, who’ve been showing Lee’s work since she was still a student at what was then the College of Santa… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Tanaka Kyokusho
TAI Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Tanaka Kyokusho. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Tanaka Kyokusho, one of Japan’s most highly esteemed bamboo artists, presents a body of work that features elegant designs and the artist’s signature palette of lustrous black and warm gold. Tanaka’s work gracefully synthesizes sleek modern aesthetics with meticulous traditional craftsmanship. A variety of minimal forms, including trays and vessels, reflect a subtle geometric impulse that is softened by supple curves and accents of dexterous plaiting. Throughout this body of work, aesthetic tension—between light and dark colors, between… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Erik Benson: Urban Americana
TAI Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Erik Benson: Urban Americana. Erik Benson’s new work investigates the physical and psychological infrastructure of the urban environment. Through his unique, collaged acrylic paintings and a new series of watercolors, the artist’s city scapes and urban still lifes create a visual language that communicates the intermingling of “place and placelessness.” Like a twenty-first century flâneur, Benson wanders the city observing street culture, marginal spaces, and discarded objects. From these unexamined fragments, he creates scenes in which public space intersects with individual and cultural interventions. In Braintree (seer/thinker), a cold, International Style… MORE >
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THE Magazine – Review: Erik Benson Urban Americana
If Cubism allowed us to break into pieces the complexities of the world and lay them out in two dimensions, we might view painter Erik Benson’s collaged acrylic paintings in similar terms. Instead of smashing things to pieces, Benson’s work begins as deconstructions,reconstructed. The artist’s paint-as-collage process grew from a simple misfortune—an allergy to oil paint—and the subsequent need to find a new way forward. Next was the discovery of dried drops of paint on the floor, which he peeled off and used to collage. From this resourceful beginning, Benson’s practice has grown mature and methodical: he paints acrylics onto… MORE >
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Japanese Bamboo & the World Expo: A Century of Discovery
In honor of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition centennial celebration, TAI Modern is thrilled to present an expansive group exhibition at the Japanese Friendship Garden of San Diego, San Diego, CA, September 12 – December 6, 2015.The show will include over forty bamboo artworks created by a variety of artists. This special preview exhibition on view at TAI Modern highlights several historic works, some on view for the first time. The 1915 Panama-California Exposition—which celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal and sought to establish San Diego as a port of call—was the site of a major early exhibition of Japanese… MORE >
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Oita Emerging Artists
In honor of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition centennial celebration, TAI Modern is thrilled to present the work of six select artists from the city of Beppu, Oita Prefecture. These talented young artists were chosen to show their work alongside an expansive group exhibition, Japanese Bamboo and the World Expo: A Century of Discovery, at the Japanese Friendship Garden of San Diego. This is the third and final year of a project sponsored by the Commerce and Service Promotion Division of Oita Prefectural Government. TAI Modern is very happy to lend our encouragement and support to this vital project. This year,… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Lance Letscher: Secret File
TAI Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Lance Letscher: Secret File. With Secret File, Letscher’s complex collages turn into coded messages and patterns. In the titular piece a mysterious figure carries a folder overflowing with mysterious papers and tinkertoy constructions. Secret File and its spilling secrets and inventions are, in Letscher’s words “parallel to the idea of creativity and how the work is produced.” Letscher lets his work evolves on its own, striving “stay out of the way (of the work) as much as possible.” Letscher lives, works, and collects the various found objects that make up his… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Nagakura Kenichi
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Nagakura Kenichi July 8 – July 24, 2016 Artist’s Reception: Friday, July 8, 5:00 – 7:00 pm SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO—TAI Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition by Nagakura Kenichi. This will be the artist’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery. Nagakura has been an esteemed independent artist for more than 30 years. His organic, contemporary pieces are rooted in the functional baskets and flower arranging vessels made for centuries in Japan but also borrow from wide-ranging sources, including European sculpture, the American pop art movement, indigenous Japanese forms, and cord-patterned clay work from… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Kawano Shoko
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Kawano Shoko July 29 – August 21, 2016 Artist’s Reception: Friday, July 29,5:00 – 7:00 pm Artist Demonstration: Saturday, July 30, 2 – 3:30 pm Press Contact: Nicole Brouillette 505 984 1387 nicole@taimodern.com SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO—TAI Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition by Kawano Shoko.This will be the artist’s first solo show with TAI Modern. “The perfect marriage of traditional and contemporary; craftsmanship and sculpture; the past and the future,” is how 2002 Cotsen Bamboo Prize Judge, Bruce Pepich, director of the Racine… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE: Masterpieces of Japanese Bamboo Art
Masterpieces of Japanese Bamboo Art June 14 – July 6, 2017 Opening Reception: Wednesday, June 14, 5:00 – 8:00 pm TAI Modern at Joan B Mirviss LTD 39 East 78th Street, Suite 401 New York, NY 10075 TAI Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Masterpieces of Japanese Bamboo Art. 2017 is an important year for Japanese bamboo art. It is the 50th anniversary of Shono Shounsai being appointed a Living National Treasure,becoming the first bamboo artist to receive this distinction. 2017 is the also the year that the Metropolitan Museum of Art will open Japanese… MORE >
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Honda Syoryu Essay
When I first learned that bamboo artist Honda Syoryu studied under Kadota Niko, I was puzzled. Kadota Niko, a prominent member of the Iwao lineage, worked in the traditional style of the Beppu region and was known for his imposing, extremely intricate jar-shaped flower baskets. Honda is recognized primarily as a sculptor, and even the vessels he made in his early career had an artistic style and sensitivity that felt modern, innovative and foreign to Beppu. I wondered if Honda was rebelling against his teacher and the regional tradition he had been taught. However, I soon began to feel the… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE: TAI Modern at Art Miami 2017
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: TAI Modern at Art Miami 2017 December 5th– 10th, 2017 One Herald Plaza, Miami, FL Contact: Arianna Borgeson Arianna@taimodern.com (505) 984-1387 TAI Modern is pleased to announce its participation in the 28thyear of Art Miami. This year’s fair will be held at a new location at One Herald Plaza, on 14thStreet between the Venetian and MacArthur Causeways. Art Miami opens with a VIP preview on Thursday, December 5th, and runs through Sunday, December 10th. TAI Modern will be exhibiting recent works by contemporary Japanese bamboo masters, as well as contemporary American artists of various media. For TAI… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE: TAI Modern at Asia Week New York
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: TAI Modern at Asia Week New York Realization of Form: Masterworks of Japanese Bamboo Art March 15th– 24th, 2018 Exhibiting at Jason Jacques Gallery 29 East 73rd St, Apt. 1 New York, NY 10021 NEW YORK, NEW YORK—TAI Modern is pleased to announce its participation in Asia Week New York 2018. The exhibition, Realization of Form: Masterworks of Japanese Bamboo Art, will be on view March 15-23 at Jason Jacques Gallery, 29 East 73rd St, Apt. 1, New York, NY. An opening party will take place Friday, March 16th, 6-9 pm. For TAI Modern’s first year participating… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE: Three Generations of Wada Waichisai
Three Generations of Wada Waichisai June 29, 2018 – July 22, 2018 Opening Reception: Friday, June 29, 5-7 pm Gallery Talk with Koichi Okada: Saturday, June 30, 3-4pm Contact: Arianna Borgeson Arianna@taimodern.com (505) 984-1387 TAI Modern is pleased to present Three Generations of Wada Waichisai, an exhibition of 16 works from this influential, but little studied bamboo art lineage. Wada Waichisai I (1851-1904) was a pioneering artist and teacher in the Kansai region. However, his son and grandson, Wada Waichisai II (1877-1933) and Wada Waichisai III (1899-1975), moved away from Japan’s artistic centers and refrained from public exhibitions while they… MORE >
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Teo González: 115, 117 Black and White
Teo González will patiently punch you in the face. The mild mannered Spaniard who calls NYC home these days, produces immediately eye-popping, brain-grabbing paintings that must take months to fully complete. González applies “dots and drops” of enamel onto a matte acrylic surface, capitalizing on a contrast in sheen to get the viewer’s attention. Add the benefit of black and white and Shazam! – all that time patiently arranging his dots and drops pays off with a visual grip like a sock in the eye. This is not a bad thing, especially because it’s no cheap shot: González summons you… MORE >
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From Long Ago to Now
Linda Whitaker’s work is being honored at Eight Modern 20 years after she stopped painting. Not many midlife former artists are honored with a retrospective 20 years after they stopped painting, but that’s the anomalous situation California real estate agent Linda Whitaker finds herself in today. A show featuring never-seen work she did two decades ago in northern New Mexico is opening for a five-week run at Eight Modern. It happened because of the extensive memory of design consultant David Hundley, who had remembered paintings by Whitaker that he loved when he saw them in Taos that long ago. Hundley,… MORE >
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Roger Shimomura: An American Knockoff
When President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942, the lives of thousands of Japanese Americans were instantly altered. Roger Shimomura, an artist who has taught at the University of Kansas for over 40 years, was one of the people whose life has been drastically influenced by the legislation. His earliest childhood memories are of the internment camp he and his family were sent to when he was a toddler. Recently awarded a USA Ford Fellowship to honor his lifetime of artistic contribution, Shimomura currently has three separate exhibitions traveling around the country. One will be spending a little over a month in… MORE >
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Teenage Symphonies to God
David X. Levine, “Teenage Symphonies to God,” Cynthia Broan, 423 West 14th Street. If a Tantric master were reborn as an American student of rock ‘n’ roll, he might make works like Mr. Levine’s paintings on paper. The best are pulsating concentric rings of colored circles, like strings of beads, with hand-written words referring to the Velvet Underground, the Beach Boys and other classic groups. Slightly dirtied and roughened up, they look antique, as though they have been exhumed from some forgotten monastery (Johnson).
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Play it Loud
In one of the most harmonious pairings since Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, David X. Levine and Antonio Adriano Puleo are united this month at Dust Gallery’s Combatants and Correspondents, which opened Friday. The exhibit showcases not only the two artists’ works produced independently of one another in their respective home cities of New York and Los Angeles, but also highlights adventures in color and texture that are clearly a joint experience. These artists know each other and their show is an exercise in two-dimensional media nudging out to engage all the senses, all the time. Inside the gallery,… MORE >
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David X. Levine: Recent Drawings
Sound and Vision David X. Levine, who has drawings up at osp gallery, experiences synesthesia: When he hears music, he sees colors. Many of this drawings reference musical overlay sometimes underlines and sometimes detracts from the purely visual experience of looking at his art. Levine works on a smallish scale, mostly in colored pencil, occasionally collaging bits of paper onto his drawings. He starts with a basic vocabulary of loopy, biomorphic forms. In one series of works, these forms stand alone: “Ray Charles Red” shows the intensely red shape of the head of a golf club, with a single white… MORE >
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Lance Letscher: Newly Industrious
Over the years, Lance Letscher’s work has become richer and more mysterious. “Industry and Design,” the current exhibition of his work at D Berman Gallery, signals new shifts in the collages for which he has gained national notoriety. Some are much thicker and meatier, adding a sculptural depth to the work. And Letscher, a self-described colorist, takes color to a whole new level here: deep and rich and thoroughly satisfying. Combining the illusions of depth created by the color-play with the real spatial depth of the bas-relief brings new layers to art that is created out of reused, printed, drawn,… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Redefining the Canvas: Edda Renouf, Ramona Sakiestewa and Marie Watt
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO—Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Redefining the Canvas: Edda Renouf, Ramona Sakiestewa and Marie Watt. The artists each use media and techniques associated with textiles but present and conceptualize their work in a way that blurs and then redefines the traditional understanding of the ‘canvas.’ For Renouf, Sakiestewa and Watt, the canvas functions as an art object, not just a foundational medium. Sakiestewa’s work in this exhibition is the culmination of her 35-year career as a weaver. Stating “Change is good,” the artist has announced that the Nebula series of tapestries are the… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Linda Whitaker: The Floor of the Sky
September 4 – October 11, 2009 SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Linda Whitaker: The Floor of the Sky. Whitaker was a respected artist who spent time in Taos before retiring from the art world 20 years ago. Exhibition curator David Hundley, a celebrated design consultant who has worked with Lexus, Ralph Lauren and Gucci and the exhibit designer for the recent show Hearst the Collector at LACMA, sees Whitaker’s compositions play out in front of him every day in New Mexico. He felt compelled to stage another exhibition of the artist’s… MORE >
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Albuquerque/Journal North – Triangulation of Concept
Despite, or maybe because of, a barelydry bachelor of fine arts from the College of Santa Fe, Katherine Lee paints without rules, letting instinct take her where it will. “A painting will inevitably gain meaning, become a story—there is no getting around that. A mark stands for itself but will also be assigned (by the mind) an anthropomorphic significance or history. This is partially why I paint what I paint, because I do not think it matters what is painted. It is very hard to make art that is not exclusively about ourselves,” she told the Journal with a wisdom… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Katherine Lee: The Brazil Series
Katherine Lee: The Brazil Series June 19-July 19, 2009 Artist’s Reception: Friday, June 19, 5:30-7:30 p.m. SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Katherine Lee: The Brazil Series. Katherine Lee’s paintings transform familiar settings — a motel patio, an airport tarmac — into scenes at once familiar yet unnerving. A deserted patio deteriorates in the sun and passenger planes stand abandoned on a runway. They are spaces of suspended action and endless possibility, unmanned but not abandoned. The work simultaneously evokes a sense of quiet comfort and bleak solitude. Lee leverages the dysfunction… MORE >
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Linda Whitaker
The trees in Linda Whitaker’s landscapes have become more and more anthropomorphic, emotional and sexy in the last few years. Her new, large oil paintings star a faceless, strong-bodied female figure, who is the wise center of metaphorically imaged psychic epiphanies. Her shift from landscape to figure is not so much an abrupt change as it is an evolutionary development, abetted by Whitaker’s recent six-month painting residency in New Mexico, where that severer geography deprived this spirit of a hiding place. She also came back with the 12 drawings in the “Taos Series.” These drawings (14” x 17”) are bold… MORE >
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Art in Review: LA to Taos: 40 Years of Friendship
After a tremendous amount of hype and hoopla, the so-billed Taos Summer of Love 2009 has begun. And the big wheel that is getting everyone’s attention is actor/director and former Taos resident Dennis Hopper. In celebration of Easy Rider, released 40 years ago — and filmed partly in Taos — the town has a group of special events that are supposed to take people back to a time of love beads, really long hair, VW vans painted in psychedelic colors and, well, other stuff that (most) parents did not condone. Part of the celebration includes two exhibitions at the Harwood… MORE >
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Pipo Nguyen-Duy: The Garden
Sam Lee Gallery follows up its dynamic group exhibition I AM I A KILLER with Pipo Nguyen-Duy’s cyclical photography project, The Garden. Behind his camera, Vietnamese-born Nguyen-Duy waits — and waits some more — as he follows the transformation of a single greenhouse through successive states of abandonment and flourish. He captures the brittle, twiggy remains of winter, the verdant shoots growing under the warm summer sun, and the various objects — such as an old automobile — that inhabit the space. In his ambitious, finely executed endeavor, Nguyen-Duy stimulates the senses and imposes a powerful emotional narrative on a… MORE >
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East of Eden
Pipo Nguyen-duy’s “East of Eden” at Sam Lee Gallery is an exhibition of beautiful, large-format, staged color photographs that manage to be lyrical, sentimental, conceptual and narrative, all at the same time. A self-confessed response to the loss and rebirth of America’s Edenic status in the post-9/11 imagination, East of Eden is Nguyen-duy’s attempt to explore and rebuild the mythos of American exceptionalism. Taking his historical cues from the Hudson River Valley School’s use of the landscape to explore ideas of nationalism and optimism, Nguyen-duy presents us with landscapes that play out some of the fears, anxieties, and grief in… MORE >
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Hopper Curates: Larry Bell, Ron Cooper, Ronald Davis, Ken Price and Robert Dean Stockwell
Dennis Hopper’s presence in Taos in the 1960s was, in large part, the beginning of a third wave of internationally recognized artists following in the footsteps of the historic Taos Founders and Taos Moderns. In HOPPER CURATES, Dennis Hopper has selected from a portion of the Los Angeles artists who have made Taos, New Mexico their home. These artists first came together in the early 1960’s, during a time when the number of serious artists in Los Angeles was minimal. They lived in the same neighborhoods, frequented the same haunts and knew each other based on their chosen profession as… MORE >
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Local IQ – Artist Finely Details Dark U.S. chapter
The only two lithographs in Minidoka on My Mind, “American Guardian” and “Mix and Match 1,” somehow capture the feeling that emanates from the entire collection, which, with these two exceptions, features exclusively acrylics on canvas. The clean lines and evidently deliberate placement of details — shadows, creases in clothing, facials lines and expressions — make the pieces appear more like woodcuts or frames out of a comic book. Minidoka was the site of a relocation center for Japanese Americans during World War II. Roger Shimomura’s paintings feature barbed wire and soldiers, the dulled colors of a desolate desert landscape… MORE >
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Santa Fe Reporter – Camp Legends
The bold colors, clean lines and graphic novel styling of roger Shimomura’s paintings draw the viewer in with their cheery pop-art façade. When the viewer considers the paintings’ subjects, however a more sinister focus emerges. Shimomura spent three years of his young life in Minidoka, a Japanese-American internment camp in Idaho, during World War II. While the history of these internment camps has been explored in such novels as Snow Falling on Cedars and several nonfiction works, the details of this particularly ugly period in American history are greatly ignored by mainstream history narratives. Shimomura, throughout his 40-year career,… MORE >
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Albuquerque/Journal North – Forced to Remember
Most of us can’t retrieve memories of events that occurred before the age of 3, and many of us don’t remember much before the age of 5. Psychologists cal this “infantile or childhood amnesia,” and whatever the cause (there are several theories); it is part of human experience that we retain few, if any memories of our first years of life. Memory is a malleable, changeable mechanism even for the sharpest adult minds. It can be very difficult to distinguish the knowledge of an event from the memory of an event, especially if we repeatedly exchange stories about… MORE >
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Santa Fe New Mexico Pasatiempo – Their Own Private Idaho
In a work titled American Guardian, a heavily armed soldier, portrayed in jet-black silhouette , keeps vigilant duty in a guard tower. He watches below—in a space between tarpaper barracks enclosed by high barbed-wire fences is the lone object of his attention: a little boy on a tricycle. “That could be me,” said roger Shimomura, the creator of this scene. The artist, who lives on Lawrence, Kansas, spent three years as a young child in the Minidoka War Relocation Center, a Japanese internment camp in Idaho. In four series of painting about internment camps, he… MORE >
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Robert Fantozzi, Flor Garduno, Graciela Iturbide, Rachelle Mozman, Re’e Pe’e
If you are an artistic photographer; to what extent does your home—the place where you live and work—color the intent and result of the portraits you shoot? A group of artists from Mexico, Peru, Panama and Cuba whose photographs explore their subject’s connections to their cultural and geographical context are featured in “Portrait and Place,” a show opening today at Eight Modern on Delgado Street. Robert Fantozzi, Flor Garduño, Graciela Iturbide, Rachelle Mozman and Reñe Peña are included in the exhibition, gallery director Jaquelin Loyd said, “Some of the connections these photographers have to these cultures in which they work… MORE >
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Teo González: New Alchemy
“Unlike geometric and minimalist art, a González painting is not a rendering of a concept existing independently of the work; rather, a González work is a record of the artist’s process in working out the interplay of geometric and organic form, of pigments and medium, of paper and canvas as materials with their own substantial form. The drops and transparent cells that linger as marks of the artist’s process resolve into other compositions that embody a dance or rhythm of life distinctive to each work. Gonzalez’s striking new color palette—copper blue grounds and copper metallic pigment—opens up his way of… MORE >
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Teo González
“Teo González (b. 1964) is that rare and revelatory artist who finds uncompromising freedom within the confines of a strictly prescribed working methodology. In this regard he belongs to a longstanding and perennially renewed tradition of artists who have demonstrated how intense focus and, it would appear, numbing repetition can yield extraordinary aesthetic insights. Like Josef Albers (1888-1976), Agnes Martin (1912-2004), Sol Lewitt (b. 1928), Jacob El Hanani (b. 1947), and Marco Maggi (b. 1957), to name only a few examples from different generations, González cultivates expansiveness out of restriction, potential where others see limitation. Coming to terms with a… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Ronald Davis: All the Presidents’ Rooms
Ronald Davis: All the Presidents’ Rooms October 17-November 15 Artist’s Reception: Friday, October 17, 5:30-7:30 p.m. SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Ronald Davis: All the Presidents’ Rooms. Legendary abstract artist Ronald Davis has produced a comprehensive series of digital compositions, one for each American president, as well as current candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. Davis recasts portraits of each president as decorative elements in a wondrously diverse assortment of “rooms.” Whether it’s a thumbnail image of Lyndon Johnson dwarfed by a bolt and a nut, or Andrew Jackson’s visage staring… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – 3D/CG: Ronald Davis
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Monday, October 29, 2007 3D/CG: Ronald Davis Three-Dimensional Computer Graphics, 2004-2007 November 16 – December 31 Artist’s Reception: Friday, November 16, 5:30 – 7:30pm SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO—Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, 3D/CG: Ronald Davis. True to its name, this solo show focuses on three-dimensional computer graphics on aluminum and paper produced by Davis from 2004 to 2007. Davis burst onto the international art scene in the 1960s and was one of the first California abstract artists of that era hailed by East Coast intelligentsia for the way his vivid, abstract art broke… MORE >
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Magnetic North, Far from the Buzz
If New York is a magnet for artists who want to become famous, Taos is a magnet for a different breed of artists — those who care far more about making art than about promoting it, said David L. Witt, curator of the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos. Even though it is difficult to impossible to launch a national reputation from a small village in northern New Mexico, many artists moved there, for various reasons. Some worked in abstract styles long before there was any market for their work in Taos. In retrospective, the artists seem either idealistic or… MORE >
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Albuquerque/Journal North – Minimalist with Power
Teo González has codified Jackson Pollock’s drips and dribbles in his collection of 13 mixed-media paintings and several drawings titled “115,717 Black and White” at the Richard Levy Gallery. González is a reductive minimalist who creates grid-based patterns of water droplets on canvas, into which he places various amounts of black acrylic pigment. When the water evaporates the resulting stains that González describes as fossils decorate the surface of the canvas. Because there is great variation in the size of the water droplets and the amount of pigment dropped into their centers, what began as a straight-line grid becomes distorted… MORE >
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Reclaiming the Third Dimension
On a recent episode of Antiques Roadshow, a man recalled vivid boyhood memories of staring at a landscape painting in his parents’ home. As a boy, he said, sometimes he felt that he was walking on the dirt road depicted in the painting. The Roadshow art expert told him the painting was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Another kind of art expert might have said that the artist had placed that road exactly where he did to cause those with the imagination to feel as if they could step into the painting. She might also have explained that illusionism… MORE >
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Notes on Shalako Mana: Critical Comments
Ramona Sakiestewa’s Shalako Mana: Critical Comments comprises a set of Japanese woodblock prints designed by the artist and executed by woodblock carver, Mr. Kitamura, and master printer, Mr. Sato, both of Kyoto, Japan. Deconstructing the critical merit assigned to Primitivism, the prints juxtapose the image of the Hopi katsina Shalako Mana with hand-written excerpts from Art in America, which become stripped of meaning as they are co-opted from critical reviews. In this context, the prevailing hierarchy of cultural expropriation – in which non-Eurocentric iconographies are appropriated toward and appraised in relation to their suitability for Eurocentric ends – is revealed… MORE >
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Dynamic Duo, Exhibition features a perfectly unlikely pairing
Two artists with concurrent solo exhibitions at Eight Modern, though wildly different in their respective approaches to art making, prove to be an uncanny and appetizing fit. Ramona Sakiestewa, the revered Hopi artist who has long made contemporary work, is celebrated alongside Ming Fay, whose trashy, alternate-reality constructions respond and reverberate so as to elevate both bodies of work to a lovely and strange discourse. Imagine a tea party with Alice that turns into My Dinner with Andre, but the Wallace Shawn character is obsessed with color. If that doesn’t make any sense, just keep in mind that making sense… MORE >
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Ramona Sakiestewa: Philosophy and Process
“Today the world belongs to the peoples of all nations…and to this world each one of us is responsible.” – Hamilton Warren, Founder, Verde Valley School, Sedona, AZ I was born and raised in the American Southwest. My upbringing and my view of the world, I realize now, were different from those of women who grew up in other places. I knew women who had families, owned businesses, raised livestock and managed ranches, and flew their own planes. I grew up believing everything was possible. Early on, I was interested in art. Art is the vocabulary of the soul and… MORE >
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THE Magazine – Artist Review: Ramona Sakiestewa
In Ramona Sakiestewa’s new tapestry series she refers to her pieces as nebulae, but this work seems more earthy to me. Instead of looking up and off into distant spaces, I feel like I’m looking down at landcapes color coded the way Landsat mapping systems appear. It is as if Sakiestewa has been taking readings of the planet’s continental geography by way of remote sensing devices, following the contours of land and oceans, or the configurations of escarpments, ridges, mesas, or mountains. But to call this work earthy does not limit the effects of these intensely vibrant tapestries, where color… MORE >
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Ronald Davis: Febuary 5 – March, 2005 at Galerie Dionisi, West Hollywood
Stylistic distinctiveness can sometimes function as a tombstone as much as a landmark for an artist’s historical contribution. The market and critical accounts can, in effect, delimit an artist’s contribution to the history of art and effectively force their vision into a tunnel defined by commercial success on one hand, and formulaic art making on the other. This may have been the case for Ronald Davis, who won early recognition for his hard edge geometric “snap line” cast resin paintings, and was thus catapulted to the fore of stylistic reactions against the rigors of Greenbergian dogma. For Davis, illusion and… MORE >
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Without Borders, Two-Artist Show at Eight Modern Takes Art Across Boundaries
One of Santa Fe’s newest galleries has garnered two distinguished contemporary artists for its homage to Indian Market: Ramona Sakiestewa and G. Peter Jemison have a show of new works opening today at Eight Modern. “We are so excited we are just ecstatic,” Eight Modern co-owner Jaquelin Loyd said. Jemison is one of Eight Modern’s stable of artists and Sakiestewa agreed to join her friend of more than 30 years for this exhibition. Both artists are Native American, but as the show testifies, they long ago moved beyond categories. In face, Loyd noted, the Eight Modern exhibition specifically confronts issues… MORE >
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Perspective Illusion: Artist Puts Computer-Generated Three-Dimensional Images on Aluminum and Paper
Renowned contemporary artist Ronald Davis’ three-dimensional computer graphics on aluminum and paper, opening today at Eight Modern, make technology the maidservant to art in a way seldom if ever seen in Santa Fe. While Davis’ images in the new show, “3DCG,” are computer-generated, the touch and expertise of a veteran artist are obvious. He created the pieces exhibited in a high-end modeling and rendering software that allowed him complete control over how the images are shaped, colored, textured and lighted. A master printer then heat- fused the images onto aluminum. The result is images that would otherwise be impossible to… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Ramona Sakiestewa: Vortex of Color
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Ramona Sakiestewa: Vortex of Color. Long celebrated for her tapestries and works on paper, Sakiestewa is a central figure among contemporary Native American artists because of her seamless synthesis of abstraction with ritual imagery and ancient techniques. Sakiestewa’s weavings show her exceptional mastery of the art, including her famed layering and blending of color, which give her tapestries what the artist describes as “a painterly quality.” “I’m interested in the whole idea of layered color, when you look at a color and it’s not just one… MORE >
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Albuquerque/Journal North – Kim Russo’s Artwork Paits Tragedy and Whimsy Along with Watercolor and Graphite
If aliens are watching CNN, they can sum up our world in one (English) word: Disaster. Ours is a world of plane crashes, hurricanes, boys with machine guns, one wretched tragedy after another. Viewers watch endless replays of the coverage, vicariously suffering along with those directly affected. But what if there was something to see in those pictures besides the attendant human suffering— a moment of beauty, a bit of irony, a spiritual memo from a higher power? And what about the turning point these disasters represent— the moment at which everything changes, after which nothing will ever be the… MORE >
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Land of Hope and Glory
Land Of Hope and Glory “Land of Hope and Glory”, also known as “Pomp and Circumstance”, is a traditional British patriotic song, written in 1902 by A. C. Benson, with music by Sir Edward Elgar. (It was adopted in the United States as the music for graduation ceremonies.) “Land of Hope and Glory” rapidly became one of the most widely popular songs played during World War 1, the war that preceded the excesses of the 1920s and the stock market crash that followed in 1929. I see a relationship between this period of time in America’s history and the events… MORE >
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New Paintings by Ron Davis
Ron Davis, now that he can in no way be regarded as entertaining a West Coast obsession for the simply seductive in surfaces (certain aspects of his work in the past having prompted this concern), and now that his irregular shapes are seasoned by time and never look just radical (those striving for mere radicalism having outdistanced him in this respect), shows himself, in his current show, and the indisputably important painter he is. His eight new works in polyester resin on fiberglass (now thin as decals and literally pasted to the walls) are a significant advance in his investigation… MORE >
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Exhibition Catalogue – Ronald Davis: On Aluminum
There is about Ronald Davis, the man and his work, a paradox. Several, in fact. For over four decades he has, in his many expressions, both two and three-dimensional, straddled an aesthetic and artistic divide between abstraction and representation, sculpture and painting, conceptualism and traditional object-making. Davis announced himself with authority in the mid-‘60s, straight out of the San Francisco Art Institute, with paintings made of molded polyester resin and fiberglass. They were the Perfect Thing at the Perfect Time. The geometric-shaped, illusionary works in vivid, virtuosic color combinations, depicted rectangular forms in perspective. They floated in the indeterminate space… MORE >
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Modern Twist to an Age-Old Idea
A spiral-shaped vessel made of interlocking sections of reddish-brown mahogany flooring catches the eye in “Enclosures,” a new exhibition at the Grounds for Sculpture. Beautiful in appearance, innovative in its use of materials and skillful in its execution, this intriguing-looking object by Foon Sham stands as a symbol for the more than two dozen artworks in this delightful group show. It could also stand as a symbol for a strand of contemporary art. Though it has no name, its chief characteristics are familiar: artwork exhibiting skill and careful hand finishing. Everywhere you look these days, artists are returning to the… MORE >
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Full Circle, An Artscape Exhibition
n Goucher College’s contribution to Artscape, curator Laura Amussen attempts to deliver an exploration of the use of the circle in a not so creatively named exhibition, Full Circle. But before you roll your eyes at the title, give it a chance. You’ll find the exhibition really does resolve itself in the end. Amussen offers a series of sphere-covered abstract paintings by local artists Carol Miller Frost, Tim Horjus, and Kate MacKinnon. The sheer visual monotony of circle after circle ultimately and unfortunately downplays their individual aesthetic value. Here, the exhibition’s theme is far too apparent and certainly does a disservice to… MORE >
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The Volcano and the Quarry, Hot Spots/Hor Pots
Iceland is not so far away from Maine, only four to five hours by air from Boston or a hop, skip and a jump away by land and sea from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland and Greenland. Yet Iceland seems so exotic, so extreme in its geography and climate. It straddles the mid-Atlantic rift that separates the North American Tectonic plate and the European Plate. That precise location on the knife-edge of the rift is the source of all its geothermal glamour. By contrast, the old stone quarries of Maine have been domesticated, harvested, and abandoned. The quarries have an architectonic… MORE >
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Edda Renouf Artist Statement
Essential to my paintings and drawings is the revealing of an abstract structure and energy inherent to my materials, the linen canvas and cotton paper. In my paintings, after holding a stretched canvas up to the light, which allows me to see the movement of the weave, I am inspired to remove certain threads which in some works I also then reapply. I continue by priming the canvas and then apply several thin coats of acrylic paint. This is followed by a careful sanding of the surface that again makes visible the life within the linen material. In my drawings… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Edda Renouf represented by Eight Modern
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce representation of Edda Renouf. Internationally renowned painter Edda Renouf has long captivated viewers with her meditative compositions. Renouf intensifies her canvases prior to painting them by revealing essential qualities hidden within the canvas or paper. Specifically, Renouf removes threads from the linen canvas or incises lines into paper before painting and sanding the surface. Geometric elements inherent to these materials are enhanced by the layering of various colors in acrylic, oil pastel or chalk, thus making visible the material’s light and energy. Through this process, Renouf’s abstract structures draw… MORE >
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Through the Buddhist Lens
Buddhist monk, political refugee, and accomplished photographer Pipo Nguyen-duy, known for challenging people to look beyond the text to discover the hidden American History, will be speaking at UMass Boston. On Thursday October 29th 2008, Nguyen-duy will be a guest speaker in Peter Kiang’s Southeast Asians in the United States class. A campus-wide lecture on October 30 at 12:30 in the Campus Center room 3540, is open to all interested students and faculty. Nguyen-duy’s accomplishments exceed the borders of the United States. From renouncing his worldly possessions to become a Buddhist monk in Northern India to receiving a grant to… MORE >
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PRESS Release: Honma Hideaki
Honma Hideaki July 27, 2018 – August 25, 2018 Artist Reception: Friday, July 27, 5-7pm Artist Talk: Saturday, July 28, 3-4 pm Contact: Arianna Borgeson arianna@taimodern.com (505) 984-1387 TAI Modern is pleased to present its upcoming exhibition by Honma Hideaki. A celebration of his thirty-year career, this solo show will feature twelve of the artist’s most impressive bamboo sculptures. Honma’s dynamic works pay homage to the natural beauty of his native Sado Island, Japan. He often uses menyadake, a bamboo species said to grow only the island, and hand-cuts bamboo from the groves outside of his home. Certain pieces, such… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Matt Magee: Thought Forms
October 3-November 15 Artist’s Reception: Friday, October 3, 5:30-7:30 p.m. SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO – Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Matt Magee: Thought Forms. New York artist Matt Magee creates graphic systems of language based on an internal, undefined lexicon of shapes and colors. His art is inspired by his Texas childhood, much of which was spent accompanying his geologist father to sites of Native American ruins and pictographs throughout the American Southwest. The first thing Magee and his father would do after returning from a journey was organize all the rocks, arrowheads and other artifacts… MORE >
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International Examiner – Minidoka on My Mind
Viewing “Minidoka on My Mind”: is like walking through a graphic novel on the Japanese American experience. Currently showing at Greg Kucera Gallery in pioneer Square, Roger Shimomura’s most series of paintings culminates 30 years reflection on the World War II internment from Shimomura’s own childhood memories and his grandmother’s writings. Two large works face off across the first room of the gallery, setting the context for the exhibit. “Nikkei Story” is the triptych of densely layered, culturally symbolic images drawing a range of sources that has influenced much of Shimomura’s past work: comic books, ukiyo-e prints, propaganda posters and… MORE >
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The Kansas City Star – Artist captures a menu of ideas
Dinner Conversation With Nancy by Roger Shimomura Where: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence Nancy must have been some woman to have inspired Roger Shimomura to create and name the painting for her. By all accounts she was. Shimomura painted Dinner Conversation With Nancy in 1983 as an untitled work, but he named it after the death of his good friend and Lawrence arts patron Nancy Anne Zimmerman. He donated it in her memory to the Spencer Museum of Art in 1988. The painting portrays a jumble of images that seem to tumble together and float on top… MORE >
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Seattle Post-Intelligencer – Roger Shimomura’s Internment Camp Memories Are Layered with Emotions
When Shirley Temple was everybody’s darling, Roger Shimomura was a toddler behind barbed wire. Although he has circled this childhood trauma for nearly a decade, only now has he given the lost world of his incarcerated youth a full measure of tragic resonance in a new series of paintings titled “Minidoka on My Mind” at the Greg Kucera Gallery. Born in Seattle, Shimomura’s earliest memories are from the Idaho detention camp where his family lived until the end of World War II. Their crime was being west Coast Japanese Americans after Japan attacked the U.S. and started the war in… MORE >
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Art Ltd. – Roger Shimomura: Minidoka on my Mind
SEATTLERoger Shimomura: “Minidoka On My Mind” at Greg Kucera Gallery Roger Shimomura’s series of paintings on the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, “Minidoka on My Mind,” won’t open in New York until May, at the Flomenhaft Gallery, but Greg Kucera Gallery debuted the series in Seattle late last year. The 30 paintings and related prints are, in a way, the Asian-American version of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series; they chronicle a powerful and painful event among an innocent, put-upon ethnic group. Shimomura, however, overlays his array of specific images of camp life with dozens of references to Japanese and… MORE >
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Minidoka Mindscapes
“MINIDOKA MINDSCAPES” To view Roger Shimomura’s art is an exciting, even dangerous experience – for his work is provocative, jarring, and vigorously challenges our notions of history, ethnic images, popular culture, and American ideals. In “Minidoka on My Mind,” he takes us head-on into the racial conflicts of World War II and the unjust imprisonment of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans (over 60% being citizens). He says that these “images are scraped from the linings of my mind – not necessarily what I remembered specifically, but what I respond with when I think of camp” Shimomura’s latest series of camp paintings… MORE >
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Smithsonian Magazine – Back to the Figure
Recognizable forms are showing up in the works of a new wave of contemporary painters The death of painting was first predicted in the middle of the 19th century, when the advent of photography seemed to snatch reality out of the painter’s hand. “If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions,” wrote French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire in 1859, “it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely.” Artists have been trying to come to terms with photography’s implications ever since. Impressionists such as Monet and Renoir, rejecting the static, mechanical imagery of… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Portrait and Place: Contemporary Latin American Photography
January 30-Febuary 28 SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO – Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Portrait and Place: Contemporary Latin American Photography. Portrait and Place brings together a group of artists from Mexico, Peru, Panama and Cuba whose photographs explore their subjects’ connections, both expected and unexpected, to their cultural and geographical context. Included in the exhibition are Robert Fantozzi, Flor Garduño, Graciela Iturbide, Rachelle Mozman and René Peña. Born in 1953 and based in Lima, Fantozzi won first place in a photography contest sponsored by the University of Lima in 1976. Inspired to pursue photography as a… MORE >
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Northwest Asian Weekly – Roger Shimomura, artist on a mission
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PRESS RELEASE – Built: Constructed Objects by Ted Larsen
Built: Constructed Objects by Ted Larsen June 13-July 20, 2008 SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO – Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Built: Constructed Objects by Ted Larsen. Larsen’s evolving exploration of the detritus of consumer culture and minimal sculpture reaches a remarkable culmination in his first solo exhibition at Eight Modern. He transforms salvage material into intimate forms that he calls constructed objects. Traces of past lives are perceptible in the exactingly pieced-together fragments of scrap metal that constitute the surfaces of Larsen’s sculpture. Larsen, a longtime resident of Santa Fe, was awarded a grant from The… MORE >
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Santa Fe New Mexican – Nancy Youdelman: Dress to Transgress
“An association lurked in every fold: each fall of lace and gleam of embroidery was like a letter in the record of her past. ” – Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth The soundtrack of artist Nancy Youdelman’s childhood was the whir of a Singer sewing machine–the sounds of her mother stitching, hemming, and seaming dress after dress for Nancy and her sisters. Youdelman’s recollections of sorting buttons, winding ribbon, and toying with notions have informerd her work, which explores how memory is bound up in clothing and other personal belongings. Using found fabrics and materials, the sculptor creates objects… MORE >
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Albuquerque/Journal North – The Women Behind the Art
Since I began this column a bit more than a year ago, I’ve tried to be fairly democratic in my choices of exhibitions to review, covering galleries and museums, group and solo shows, well-known and emerging artists, etc. I’ve also avoided writing about the same artist more than once. But I stopped in to see Nancy Youdelman’s exhibit at Eight Modern and quickly decided that once a year is OK. Youdelman turns antique dresses and shoes into mixed-media relief sculptures, covering them with ephemera, photos and domestic notions- safety pins, buttons, strings of beads. Using encaustic wax, paint and, in… MORE >
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Albuquerque/Journal North – Castoffs Reinvented
To Nancy Youdelman, process equals pleasure as she creates the mixed-media assemblages that honor women’s work through the ages. “I absolutely love what I do,” the Clovis, Calif., artist told the Journal recently. “I am always amazed that I am able to teach 2½ days and support what I love to do.” Youdelman’s art gets a solo exhibition when it opens today at Eight Modern on Delgado Street. “Threads of Memory” shows recent work exploring the threads that connect memory and objects, interweaving broader themes of love, death, history and femininity. Although she uses vintage girls’ and women’s clothing with… MORE >
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THE Magazine – Ronald Davis: 3D/CG
Opticality is paramount: students of photography no doubt can point to a particular moment in the history of the medium – say Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession group exhibition at the Albright Art Gallery in 191O – when photography achieved de jure recognition by a museum as a legitimate art form – not unlike the arrival of Modern Art in America with the Armory Show of 191 3. What is less easy to pinpoint is the more likely earlier scenario wherein artists’ use of the medium argued for its de facto acceptance as art. Digital Imaging is by now a familiar component in… MORE >
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Davis re-emerges
Former Californian Ronald Davis, who went by just the name Ron 40 years ago, has also kept thinking seriously about the peculiar relations between what paintings contain and what they are, though the limelight deserted him after the 1960s. Trillium Press recently renamed itself Electric Works and relocated from the Peninsula to a San Francisco venue large enough to hold modest exhibitions. The fourth so far, which ends today, glances through five decades of Davis’ work. Many visitors will recognize, from art history books, Davis works in tinged resin such as “Double See Through” (1969). In their scummy color and… MORE >
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Zane’s World: Ever After
Fairy tales are always being co-opted. The famous brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm who, in my day, were often mistaken to the originators of all fairy tales (whereas now Nickelodeon is more likely to be the mistaken originator), simply collected and interpreted stories they gathered in Germany for Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales). The collection was seminal only in its scholarly application. The Brothers Grimm, linguists and philosophers—and only accidentally folklorists—were subject to plenty of criticism during their time and were frequently accused of misrepresenting or altering tales that had been handed down through oral tradition within the… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Efren Candelaria: Hardly Smooth
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO– Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Hardly Smooth: Efren Candelaria. This solo exhibition features an array of minimalist graphite drawings on wood veneer and paper installed by the artist, as well as a multi-media installation. At the core of each piece is Candelaria’s freehand drawing of the vertical line. The literally linear expresses a non-linear grammar that reflects an organic, unconstrained approach. Through his work abstract ideas find concrete form. As is typical of the artist’s exhibitions, Hardly Smooth will not be a display of disparate works of art, but rather a comprehensive… MORE >
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Celeste Roberge
Celeste Roberge turns her odd notions about time into curious little objects, prints, and sizeable construction projects, leaving us to ponder the subject. Consider, for instance, her “Raum/Room,” an outdoor living room of antique furniture and sixteen tons of stacked sandstone which remains on long term loan at the Schaumburger Quarry in Steinbergen, Germany. While Ms. Roberge has noted that her works often emerge from her reflections upon the intersection of geologic time and human time, certainly “Raum/Room” resonates with the many Germans who can still recall WWII when it was not uncommon to see furniture and rubble combined, but… MORE >
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Nancy Youdelman
The haunted territory of Memory is artist Nancy Youdelman’s preserve. Her antique, disembodied dresses and other articles of female attire are constructed, literally and figuratively, of the very stuff of recall; old photographs, letters, and envelopes, buttons, bric-a-brac, and even twigs, leaves, and the earth itself. Rummaging around in the past is usually the writer’s task, and there is a definite, persistent literary aspect to these rather wraithlike, wall-hung and free-standing artifacts of the feminine. It is no surprise, then, to find that Ms. Youdelman majored in English Literature at California State University at Fresno. Added to this is a… MORE >
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Robert Mangold
Throughout his long artistic and teaching career Robert Mangold has explored the possibilities of three-dimensional expression in wildly diverse forms and conceptions. Beginning with his earliest constructions that made direct reference to the human figure, through his first kinetic sculptures in 1958, to his wind-driven works and a series of I-beam investigations into negative space, to his latest Minimalist abstractions of movement in space, Mangold has imaginatively probed a life-long fascination with time, space and motion, both man-made and from nature. The roots of kinetic sculpture and constructivism reside, famously, of course, in the works of Naum Gabo and László… MORE >
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Robert Lobe
It was perhaps James Joyce who noted that no one is more present as when they are absent. The same may be said for things, and it is this Joycean paradox, among many other associations and disassociations, that comes to mind when considering Robert Lobe’s life-sized replications of rocks and trees in tin. These embossed reliefs, tree-wrapped sheets of anodized aluminum painstakingly hammered to exact detail, expand the boundaries of the already expansive field of American nature-based art as they narrow the gap between hyper-realism and abstraction. The ambiguities and echoes summoned by these spectral trees, drained of color and… MORE >
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Ming Fay
Ming Fay’s oversized, realistic, painted bronze cherries, apples, and chili peppers are what you might call “aesthetically modified fruits and vegetables.” The artist himself has described his jungle-like, room-sized environments as “mythical folk gardens,” and in 2005 the New York Times called his installation, “Ramapo Garden of Desire,” at Ramapo College, Mahwah, New Jersey, “…one of the most tough minded, brain-expanding artworks on view anywhere…” “Tough minded” and “mythical gardens” may seem to be contradictory judgments from the critic and the artist, not surprisingly, perhaps, but Ming’s items of pumped up produce are wildly amusing, in a sinister Hitchcockian way,… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE: Ted Larsen awarded Pollock-Krasner grant
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wednesday, April 16, 2008 Ted Larsen awarded Pollock-Krasner grant Contact: Jaquelin Loyd or Mark Thoma 505 995 0231 info@eightmodern.com SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO – Eight Modern is pleased to announce that gallery artist Ted Larsen has been honored with a prestigious 2008 grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Larsen’s bold, inventive approach to sculpture helped him secure the grant, which was established in 1985 to honor the legacy of famed artists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner by supporting artists around the world who meet the dual criteria of recognizable artistic merit and personal or professional financial need. The… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Threads of Memory: Recent Work by Nancy Youdelman
April 11-May 18, 2008 Artist’s Reception: Friday, April 11, 5:30-7:30 p.m. SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO – Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Threads of Memory: Recent Works by Nancy Youdelman. Both painstakingly personal and remarkably accessible, Youdelman’s mixed-media assemblages explore the threads that connect memory and objects, interweaving broader themes such as love, death, history and femininity. Youdelman transforms vintage girls’ and women’s clothing with found objects – photographs, letters, jewelry, buttons and even plant material – to create inspired sculptures, bronzes and reliefs. Youdelman has been perfecting the conversion of cast-off clothing into contemporary art for… MORE >
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John Ruppert
John Ruppert’s human-scale vessels of cyclone fencing float like ghostly, woven cocoons in the landscape. The webs of industrial strength lace – a “Gourd” a “Sphere” – look tethered to the earth only by the shadows that they cast upon it. These look more substantial than the objects themselves, at times. Indeed, the hazy apparitions of iron and air appear as insubstantial veils of light and shadow; while they “hold” everything in their semi-transparency, they “contain” nothing, presenting a neat, minimal paradox. For several years as a young boy in the early 1960s Ruppert lived with his family in Amman,… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Once There Was, Once There Wasn’t: Fairy Tales Retold
September 14 – October 7 Reception: Friday, September 14, 2007, 5:30 – 7:30pm SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO – Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Once There Was, Once There Wasn’t: Fairy Tales Retold. This group exhibition features works of art inspired by folk tales, fairy stories, and mythic archetypes. With works by a number of artists, including Jessica Abel, Jim Dine, David Hockney, Peregrine Honig, Fay Ku, Elizabeth “Grandma” Layton, Adela Leibowitz, David Levinthal, Paula Rego, Kiki Smith, and Richard Tuttle, this exhibition illuminates and challenges traditional interpretations of fairy tales. Stories heard in childhood exert a… MORE >
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LA Times – Nicholas Wilder: Was Contemporary Art Dealer in L.A.
Nicholas Wilder: Was Contemporary Art Dealer in L.A. Nicholas Wilder, who was considered Los Angeles’ leading contemporary art dealer when he left the city in 1979, died Friday of AIDS-related causes at his home in New York City. He was 51, said Craig Cook, his longtime companion and business associate. Wilder was an enigma even in the disparate world of art, a genteel man of impeccable manners with a hippie bent who burst upon the local scene in the 1960s, a time he recalled in an interview last November as a “golden age.” Is it necessary to live in New… MORE >
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Santa Fe New Mexican – Graphite Poet
“I considered myself a poet before I considered myself a visual artist,” said David X Levine, who recently spoke to Pasatiempo by phone from his New York studio. “I suppose in many ways I still am one. There’s definitely a poetry aspect to some of the work in this show.” On Friday, Dec. 17, Levine’s first solo show at Eight Modern, titled She Kept Her Heart Parked on a Hill, opens with a public reception. Levine is often mistaken for a synesthete — someone who links the stimulation of multiple sensory or cognitive pathways at once, such as the perception… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – East Meets West: Ramona Sakiestewa and G. Peter Jemison
East Meets West Ramona Sakiestewa & G. Peter Jemison August 17 – September 16 Reception: Friday, August 17, 2007 5:30 – 7:30pm SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO–Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, East Meets West: Ramona Sakiestewa & G. Peter Jemison. Featuring works by Ramona Sakiestewa and G. Peter Jemison, two of the United States’ most celebrated Native American artists, the exhibition specifically confronts issues of cross-cultural communications and interdisciplinary practice. Born of Hopi ancestry and raised in the American Southwest, Ramona Sakiestewa is renowned for her tapestries and works on paper – clever compounds of postmodern critical… MORE >
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Art in America – Raymond Jonson at Peyton Wright
In 1909, Raymond Jonson (1891-1982) became the first pupil to enroll in the new Museum Art School in Portland, Ore. Although he left the following year for Chicago, his initial training under Kate Simmons, a former student of the influential art educator Arthur Wesley Dow, impressed upon the young Jonson an esthetic derived from Dow’s primary passions: Japanese art and the Nabis. On this foundation, Jonson built a philosophy of art enriched by his reading of Kandinsky’s Art of Spiritual Harmony (1911), his encounter with European modernism at the Armory Show in Chicago in 1913 and his experience as a… MORE >
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Art in America – Takeshi Kawashima at Mitchell Algus
Some of the earliest of Takeshi Kawashima’s works included in this absorbing exhibition established a grid-oriented trajectory. The show began with eight small, untitled drawings in pencil, ink and gouache dating from the mid-1950s to 1961, preceding the artist’s 1963 emigrationfrom Japan to New York, where he established permanent residence. One casually limned pencil drawing is ranked loosely in the grid. Its elements appear to draw on the traditional Japanese badges known as mon, signs of family, clan or guild, referential designs placed within a roundel. These symbols also suggest the graphic signs intended to orient travelers or, for that… MORE >
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The Independent – Sol LeWitt
On the evening of 24 February 2000, Sol LeWitt took part in an odd event at Brandeis University in Massachussetts. Before a mesmerized audience, the artist pried open a box holding a work he had interred in it 25 years before. This turned out to be another box – a one-inch cube of white paper this time, which, when opened, revealed a diagonal line drawn across its bottom plane beside the words “A line not straight corner to corner”, its maker’s signature and a date, 13 October 1974. LeWitt, who had clearly forgotten all about the work, held it up… MORE >
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The New York Times – Sol LeWitt, Master of Conceptualism, Dies at 78
Sol LeWitt, whose deceptively simple geometric sculptures and drawings and ecstatically colored and jazzy wall paintings established him as a lodestar of modern American art, died yesterday in New York. He was 78 and lived mostly in Chester, Conn. The cause was complications from cancer, said Susanna Singer, a longtime associate. Mr. LeWitt helped establish Conceptualism and Minimalism as dominant movements of the postwar era. A patron and friend of colleagues young and old, he was the opposite of the artist as celebrity. He tried to suppress all interest in him as opposed to his work; he turned down awards… MORE >
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Photo Insider – Feature Story #1: Duane Michals
Life is too short to be distracted by the pesky, mundane questions that plague most photographers: “How can I get this model to smile without showing her teeth?” or, “Does this house look better with or without the little red wagon in front?” So think hard, think deep and ask new questions. As a photographer, how can you present the nature of existence and the drama of the human condition? How will you define beauty and ugliness in visual terms? What is death and why is mankind fixated on rational explanations of the afterlife? In short, send the models home… MORE >
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ArtNet Magazine – Matt Magee: The Gotham Dispatch
Op Art recently has come into focus again, with Bridget Riley’s retrospective at the Dia Art Center in Chelsea and PaceWildenstein showcasing the British painter’s eye-catching canvases. Add Matt Magee to the list of artists who use repetition and color with precision. Magee’s first solo show of paintings just closed at Bill Maynes gallery. The 11 works from 1999 and 2000 are oil on wood panel and collectively contain thousands of circles in various sizes arranged in row after row. Magee’s palette is earthy-electric, with natural subdued tones playing off of vibrant cadmium-infused colors and alternating shades of gray. The… MORE >
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Art in America – Matt Magee at Bill Maynes
Matt Magee’s beautiful paintings might seem merely decorative were it not for their finely tuned optical and, one feels, spiritual intensity. He achieves an overall luminosity with horizontal rows of tiny disks, 1/2 inch across and smaller, set against larger, horizontal zones of color. (In some less convincing works these disks cluster within concentrically nesting rectangles.) The dot-based modularity of the paintings suggests a curious and contradictory range of correspondences: weaving, fields of pixels, molecular configurations, Aboriginal “dreamings.” Each of Magee’s units is composed of two colors and ranges in configuration from a dot with a thin outline to a… MORE >
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Art in America – Hong Hao at Chambers
Hong Hao was born in China in 1965, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, which stifled independent creative activity. An intensely witty and sophisticated graphic artist and photographer whose work celebrates the tradition of the artist’s book in contemporary Western and ancient Chinese forms, Hong graduated from the printmaking department at Beijing’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square protests. “In The Reading Room,” his first U.S. solo exhibition, he played on the Duchampian theme of the nature of books, both revering and lampooning their making and use. In several components of a work… MORE >
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Miami Art Zine – Arteamericas in Miami Beach
Remember when we waited all year to see a tepid Miami art show? Probably not; it was some time ago. The joke used to be that the only culture was in our yogurt, or something like that. Don’t quote me. Now we’re spoiled for choice in art exhibitions. I debated going to the Arteaméricas Fair and decided that it is always interesting to see what is au courant. Seventy galleries representing 300 artists from 16 countries in the Americas converged in the Miami Beach Convention Center, March 16-18, for the fifth year of the Latin American Art Fair. I went… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Carlos Pérez Vidal: Time as Metaphor
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Monday, July 9, 2007 Reception: Friday, July 20, 2007, 5:30 – 7:30pm Artist Talk: Saturday, July 21, 2007, 4:30 – 5:30pm SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO–Eight Modern is pleased to present Time as Metaphor, Carlos Pérez Vidal’s first exhibition in New Mexico. The exhibition will showcase new video, performance, painting, sculpture, and mixed-media work by the Cuban artist. Addressing the issues of personal identity, historical memory, and cultural stereotyping, Pérez Vidal communicates his sociopolitical observations in a visual language that surreally compounds parodic, tragic, and uncanny elements. The artist is known for creating confrontational dialogues between diverse iconographies… MORE >
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ArtNexus – Carlos Perez Vidal at Merrill Lynch Arteaméricas
English Language Edition: The fifth edition of the Merrill Lynch Arteaméricas fair was held at the Miami Convention Center for the first time… Hardcore Art Contemporary Space presented an interesting selection of works… Taking shoes as his central theme, Carlos Pérez Vidal presented a small and delicate installation titled Twenty Seven Chosen and One Errant; it was in the shape of an altar, at which shoes represented the traces left by time and by civilizations. With its conferences and debates… and the participation of museums and collections, this year’s Merrill Lynch Arteaméricas sought to integrate and enrich its possibilities, to… MORE >
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New York Magazine – William Wegman: Puppy Love
On weekends, William Wegman’s “Funney/Strange” at the Brooklyn Museum becomes a playground for parents and children, most of whom have a grand time laughing at the posed pooches. No other artist today can pull that kind of crowd. (Calder came close, but usually just for his child-friendly “Calder’s Circus”) As the art world knows, Wegman has created a significant body of work apart from his portraits of Weimaraners, notably paintings and human-only videos. But his dogs inevitably steal the show. The question that beguiles me is why they engender more than a passing smile. What makes them more than doggy… MORE >
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Butler Institute of American Art, exhibition catalog – Ronald Davis: Abstractions 1962 – 2002
[This essay was originally printed in the catalog that accompanied the forty work retrospective, “Ronald Davis: Abstractions 1962 – 2002,” exhibited at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio in October, 2002.] The best abstract painting made in America during the past thirty-five years has been eclipsed. Great American abstract painting hasn’t been replaced by anything comparable, and I’m using the word eclipse here because eclipses pass. Fanfare and fluff tend to obscure what has always been: that great art gets overlooked by mediocrity, pretense and market strategies, and today is no exception. We all pay the price and… MORE >
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BlumHelman Los Angeles, exhibition catalog – Ronald Davis: Objects and Illusions
Between January, 1968 and October, 1969, Ronald Davis produced a remarkable series of twenty-nine paintings roughly twelve feet across in the shape of dodecagons. These paintings represent a unique synthesis of the diverse concerns of the artists of his generation (he was born in 1937) in sustaining modernist painting as a viable vehicle for experiment and innovation. A native Californian, Davis’s preoccupation with the art of painting was unusual in the context of the LA scene. At the time, art history in Los Angeles seemed a subject more interesting to costume films than to young artists anxious to assert their… MORE >
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ArtNews – Ronald Davis at Dionisi
Ronald Davis was an exemplar of the 1960s Los Angeles Fetish Movement–a group of artists who transformed plastic, fiberglass, and other materials into brightly colored, hard-edge geometric forms. He was also an early practitioner of trompe l’oeil abstract illusionism that pervaded abstract painting in the 1970s and ’80s. He once exhibited widely and frequently, and has never withdrawn completely from the circuit; but, over the past 30 years, he has assumed a lesser presence, moving to Taos and becoming involved in electronic music and other relatively hermetic pursuits. This selection of work from 1974 to 2004 was especially welcome because… MORE >
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Ronald Davis: Surface and Illusion
Ron Davis is a young California artist whose new paintings, recently shown at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, are among the most significant produced anywhere during the past few years, and place him, along with Stella and Bannard, at the forefront of his generation. In at least two respects Davis’ work is characteristically Californian: it makes impressive use of new materials – specifically, plastic backed with fiberglass – and it exploits an untrammeled illusionism. But these previously had yielded nothing more than extraordinarily attractive objects, such as Larry Bell’s coated glass boxes, or ravishing, ostensibly pictorial effects,… MORE >
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The Santa Fe New Mexican/Pasatiempo – Robert Lobe: Seize the Trees
If trees shed their skin like snakes, the world’s forests would be littered with castings that resemble Robert Lobe’s art. His sculpted trees are eerily realistic, but, he says, he is not interested in mimicking nature. “I think the work comes out of classical sculpture – that includes modernist sculpture through Donald Judd and minimal art. In part, it begins with process – the idea of hammering aluminum around trees, the idea of all that detail being condensed and focused on the skin.” At one o’clock on a recent afternoon, Lobe answered a call to his studio. As is often… MORE >
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Art in America – Ming Fay and Chihung Yang at 2 x 13
Ming Fay and Chihung Yang are both transplanted artists–Fay is originally from Shanghai and Yang from Taiwan–who have lived for decades in the U.S. and currently work in New York. Fay’s gardenlike mixed-medium installations often consist of oversize artificial fruits, blossoms and vegetables, their large dimensions giving his contemplations of nature a subtle humor. Yang’s probing abstract canvases are linked to the New York School but also suggest Chinese calligraphy and ink painting. The dual show, titled “Silent Exile,” was curated by Robert C. Morgan, an art historian and critic long familiar with the two artists’ careers. Fay’s installation, Monkey… MORE >
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Paul Jenkins: The Colour Code
Rothko, Pollock and De Kooning regarded him as their equal. So why isn’t Paul Jenkins’ work celebrated? Paul Jenkins, aged 82 and now working with acrylic on very large canvasses, has outlived many of his close friends and colleagues, including De Kooning, Rothko, Pollock, Barnett Newman, Lee Krasner and Michaux. All of them treated Jenkins as a peer and equal, yet he has not so far achieved comparable fame or market status. I doubt if this worries him, for he will surely know that recognition, which cannot be quantified into dollars or a number of entrance tickets, is something different.… MORE >
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National Museum of American Art, exhibition catalog – Gene Davis: A Memorial Exhibition
Gene Davis was a major figure in 20th-century American painting whose contribution was invaluable in establishing Washington, D.C. as a center of contemporary art. Davis also played a significant national and international role in the color abstraction movement that first achieved prominence in the 1960s. Born in Washington, D.C., Davis attended local schools and later worked as a sportswriter and White House correspondent before pursuing a career in art. Although never formally trained, Davis educated himself through assiduous visits to New York’s museums and galleries as well as to Washington’s art institutions, especially the Phillips Collection. He also benefited from… MORE >
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Celeste Roberge at Aucocisco
A graduate of the Portland (now Maine) School of Art and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and a former fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, Celeste Roberge made her first major statements in sculpture in the late 1980s. Monumental pieces such as Rising Cairn (1989), a kneeling figure formed of 4,000 pounds of granite beach stones girdled in bands of galvanized steel, provoked a critical buzz. Since then, solo shows around the country have confirmed the sharpness of her conceptual vision, which has encompassed what the artist refers to as “cultural sedimentation.” In her first show… MORE >
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Albuquerque/Journal North: We Are What We Wear, and Hide in Our Closet
The initial question that entered my mind when I encountered Nancy Youdelman’s mixed-media and bronze sculptures of girls’ and women’s clothes in a group show at Eight modern was, why are clothes as an armature for art still so compelling? What was it about Youdelman’s work, among the seven strong artists in this show, that captured and held my attention? After all, many artists, especially feminist artists (a category to which Youdelman assigns herself), have explored clothing. The works of Lesley Dill and Mimi Smith come to mind, as do the idenitity-bending photographs of Cindy Sherman. Hasn’t all that can… MORE >
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John Ruppert at the Chicago Cultural Center
Vulcan, patron of smiths, is also John Ruppert’s muse. Fascinated by the earth’s magma and its geological extrusions, and drawn to the industrial forge, which mimics the process of vulcanism, Ruppert casts his sculptures in aluminum, bronze and iron. His obdurate forms can address themselves to nature or to the brawny technology of heavy manufacturing; they are also strongly narrative, relating the history of their own making. The earliest piece in the exhibition, Ingot and Mold (1983), is neatly didactic: a 5 1/2-foot steel trough, standing on end, accompanies the bronze prism that took shape inside it, recalling the Process… MORE >
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Celeste Roberge’s Funny Little Tall Tale
Bent at the knees and waist, with both hands resting on thighs, the stone figure appears ready to unwind, stand erect and march right out of the courtyard at the Portland Museum of Art and into the flowing traffic on High Street. That is the beauty of Maine sculptor Celeste Roberge’s work: Even though ”Rising Cairn” is made of wire and stone and is very much rooted in the earth, it feels kinetic and alive. Situated among the birth trees in the museum’s sculpture garden, ”Rising Cairn” stands as one of city’s signature art pieces, a true landmark that enchants… MORE >
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Robert Mangold
Robert Mangold can be classified as a true master among a very exclusive group of sculptors working with a kinetic vocabulary. Kinetic art, an art style found in sculpture that involves moveable parts, sometimes motorized pieces, shifting lights, sounds, etc., was promoted by a small group of avant-garde artists in the post-World War II period. Mangold was inspired by the first generation of these kinetic sculptors including Naum Gabo (whose Realistic Manifesto of 1920 made him a foremost influence on sculptors who followed), Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (who published Vision in Motion in 1947 at the Institute of Design in Chicago), and… MORE >
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Walter Dusenbery – A Sculptor in Love with Form
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Critical Reflections: Modern Dimensions: Contemporary American Sculpture
Have you had the Eight Modern experience? Have you seen the glorious spanking new white walls, the luscious picture windows, and the dynamically subtle modifications they’ve made? If you want your beautiful old adobe to look like the Museum of Modern Art, this new gallery on Delgado Street is a total style pointer. It’s all about doors and windows, entry and light. Who cares that somewhere in the seventies Modernism puttered out of the great game of miniature golf we’ve all come to know and love. Rumor is they plan to change the name of that particular stretch of Delgado… MORE >
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PRESS RELEASE – Modern Dimensions: Contemporary American Sculpture
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO – Eight Modern celebrates its grand opening with the inaugural exhibit, Modern Dimensions: Contemporary American Sculpture. The exhibition brings together works by seven American sculptors: Walter Dusenbery, Ming Fay, Robert Lobe, Robert Mangold, Celeste Roberge, John Ruppert, and Nancy Youdelman. Each of these highly-acclaimed artists explores diverse facets of contemporary sculpture and integrates conceptual and aesthetic ideas in bold, new terms. In developing Modern Dimensions: Contemporary American Sculpture for its grand opening, Eight Modern declares its confidence in establishing a unique venue imbued with history yet situated on the leading-edge. Analogously, the exhibit signifies the gallery’s… MORE >
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Robert Lobe – New Work
Robert Lobe’s sculptures astonish, in this déjà vu art world, with their grandeur and originality of vision. Of his new works, both wall pieces and freestanding tree sculptures, Lobe says that he is “returning to nature in a new way, more conscious of the sublime– a sublime both fearful and beautiful.” This attitude toward nature places him as a Northern Romantic; and in his treatment of landscape, which magically fuses the scientific and the ecstatic, there are analogies to American Transcendentalism. His recent New York exhibition showed important new developments from his previous work. A deftly affirmed contrapuntal relation between… MORE >
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Ming Fay – The Hanging Gardens of Earthly Delight
MING FAY’S switched-on, tripped-out installation at the Kresge Gallery on the Ramapo College campus consists of a dozen candy-colored capsules suspended from long, vinelike branches made of wire coated in papier-mâché dangling from the 20-foot ceiling. It looks like a hive of wasp nests in trees, a toxic watermelon patch, or the Hanging Gardens of Marzipan. Inspiration for the installation, ”Ramapo Garden of Desire,” comes from the family of South American trees — chiefly Amazonian — known as Monkey Pots after their pot-shaped capsules that hold tasty nuts that monkeys crave. In fact monkeys are so keen on the nuts… MORE >
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