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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20120229
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SUMMARY:Hybrid Figures
DESCRIPTION:About the Exhibition\nYuji Hiratsuka: Hybrid Figures – exhibition essay by Carrie Phillips-Kieser \n“Living only for the moment\, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon\, sun\, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves\, singing songs\, drinking wine\, and diverting ourselves just in floating caring not a whit for the pauperism staring us in the face\, refusing to be disheartened like a gourd floating along with the floating world” – Asai Ryoi\, Tales of the Floating World. \nThis passage refers to the floating world of Ukiyo-e prints during the Edo era of the 17th century in Japan\, but it could just as easily be referring to the celebration of life depicted in Yuji Hiratsuka’s current exhibition. His etchings are of figures caught in full bloom of bleeding rose-reds\, indigo\, and rich lacquer black\, they are filled with intricate patterns and designs\, playful textures and layers; they awaken our senses and call our attention to heightened emotional tensions through their dramatic articulated gestures. The over articulated gestures of the figures are like actors arranged in synchronized poses of dance\, or moments frozen in contemplation and pleasure. \nUndeniably echoing the Barque exaggerations of past Japanese prints depicting actors from the Kabuki theatre\, particularly those of the artist Sharaku (fl. 1794-5) whose wood block prints depict contemporary actors in character conveying a sense of drama by distortion. Hiratsuka’s figures seem to announce or celebrate particular performances\, or portray emotions of the heart and body but with a contemporary update and twist. His actors are also spicy and taunt with tensions of desire and temptations. Set within luscious metaphorical landscapes\, forbidden ripe fruit is offered\, presented and indulged upon\, venus fly traps and pitcher plants mirror in the participation of the carnivorous consumption and one can not help but to feel caught up in the indulgence and even perhaps excesses of life. They fill tightly cropped spaces\, adding to the   heightened intensity of their depictions of human conditions. \nThere is also a bridging that happens in his prints; a bridge between the east and the west where traditions of the eastern past do not over shadow them being firmly rooted in Hiratsuka’s western reflections and surroundings. Hiratsuka’s use of contemporary western dress: the vests\, short flirting skirts and clinging dresses articulate current fashions of today and speak of a global merging of cultures. \nOverall the metaphors of deeper meaning\, there is a sense of humour and lightheartedness that abounds. These are happy times\, playful times\, and life is good\, even if it is seeped in extravagance\, and they beacon for us to take a moment to immerse ourselves in life’s plenty\, while we can. \nAbout the Artist\nAward-winning Yuji Hiratsuka is a professor of art at Oregon State University. He is widely exhibited through out the world and is in multiple collections\, including The British Museum in London and Tokyo Central Museum in Japan. This is his first exhibition in Calgary\, Alberta.
URL:https://albertaprintmakers.com/event/hybrid-figures/
LOCATION:Alberta
CATEGORIES:Exhibition Past,Past
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20120425
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20120603
DTSTAMP:20250801T160642Z
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SUMMARY:Transmutation of Being
DESCRIPTION:About the Exhibition\nMariana Moranduzzo-Static Processist – exhibition essay by Mario Trono \nMany artists allege a philosophical status for the meanings of their works. It‘s easy to do in artist statements\, and you can’t blame artists for trying. After all\,good work that is also compellingly theorized by its creator remains the ne plus ultra of the more stellar exhibitions. Since contemporary modes of art criticism long ago eschewed affect in favour of ontology\, and since the reports ofTheory’s demise are not so much greatly exaggerated as they are a kind of desperate\, wishful thinking\, we will continue to see some artists’ statements clogged by abstruse language and abortive argument\, tacked onto work that bears few traces of the claims made for it. \nYou will see precisely the opposite of this state of affairs in a show by visiting Portuguese artist Mariana Moranduzzo entitled Transmutation of Being. She offers an artist’s statement that I hope most viewers read after seeing (as I did) her etchings\, woodcuts\, and drawings on paper. The statement\, read after\, will most likely evince thinking congruent with your own. \nPresented many times in the work itself is the unmistakable contour of an object most figuratively akin to rock\, that most blunt symbol of materiality (and\, to the old existentialists\, of the burdens of consciousness). In a few of her counterpoint works\, the shape figures less prominently in what feel like desultory responses to those other clearer shapes\, a response that seems a type of thought. If architecture is frozen music\, then the abstractions of art are static thought. It feels to me like Moranduzzo‘s images\, collectively\, are thinking.  \nAnd they got me thinking. The rock-like object appears to float at times\, something that only suggests an experiential unlikelihood if one forgets physics. The earth itself is a weightless rock in space. But it has mass.The more mass (concentrated or otherwise) a body in space possesses\, the more gravity it has\, and as physics now tells us\, time itself will slow down near large celestial bodies. Rocks in space exist not in but are the very essence of the universe’s being.  \nBut as we all know\, paper covers rock; I wasn’t looking at rocks when I beheld these images but at paper. And so are/will you inside the exhibition space\, and that fact brings human perception into the equation that Einstein worked so hard to create in order to explain existence in space. Art\, more than other human creations\, needs to account for its own being\, especially complex art that ever sits-because of its complexity-at a cultural remove. The savviest art accounts for itself by drawing your being into a consideration of its being. This occurred to me as I beheld Moranduzzo’s “Earth Memory”wherein the rock-like object reminds one of a human skull. Gazing out of one’s skull is\, by its very nature\, a contemplative act\,and the contemplator is always deeply implicated in the contemplated. To perceive a rock or a piece of art when both you and what you look at exist together-in space and time inside never ending processes that govern existence-well\, that is itself a process. \nMoranduzzo’s work seems to suggest this\, or at the very least gets it. It’s like her images limn the contours and outlines of process ​​philosophy which holds that something we might call the Real is best understood not in terms of things but of processes. When you gaze at art\, you are in process with it\, inside the larger fold of gallery space and gallery hours\, inside the still larger phenomena of universal space and time. \nIn this sense\, Moranduzzo’s work is the real deal. Ironically\, she is a process-ist expressing herself in what is only ostensibly a static medium. Nothing is static. Not even the typographically set sequences of her and any other artist’s statement. After you’ve read my words\, and hers\, both she and I-and then you too-will move towards new and different meanings attributed to this art and what will soon become our earlier thoughts. In an unending process of meaning attribution. All our minds are one and the same as those rock-like objects-that is\, we are evidence of a coalescing in space and time of some… thing.
URL:https://albertaprintmakers.com/event/transmutation-of-being/
LOCATION:Alberta
CATEGORIES:Exhibition Past,Past
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