sarah tanguy - k@20kreegers’ art collection and life style. the building is a modernist...

THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

K@20KENDALL BUSTER WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY GENE DAVIS SAM GILLIAM TOM GREEN

LEDELLE MOE MICHAEL B. PLATT JANN ROSEN-QUERALT JOHN RUPPERT JIM SANBORN

JEFF SPAULDING DAN STEINHILBER RENÉE STOUT YURIKO YAMAGUCHI

FEBRUARY 20 – JULY 31, 2014

THE KREEGER MUSEUM 2401 FOXHALL ROAD, NW WASHINGTON, DC 20007 www.kreegermuseum.org

FOREWORD

From the inception of The Kreeger Museum exhibition program in 1998, it has been my philosophy to present

exhibitions that relate to the Museum. Past exhibitions ranged from one-man shows that included Philip Johnson,

Tom Wesselmann, William Kentridge, Oleg Kudryashov and Washington artists Sam Gilliam, William Christenberry,

Kendall Buster, Dan Steinhilber, and Gene Davis, to group shows with selections from the di Rosa Preserve collection

of California Bay Area artists and the New York artist collective, Tim Rollins + K.O.S. Each of these exhibitions

focused on a particular aspect of the Museum’s permanent collection, architecture or mission.

Over the last twenty years, Washington artists have played a prominent role in the Museum’s history—in exhibitions,

public programs, educational initiatives and outreach activities. In honor of The Kreeger Museum 20th Anniversary

and to acknowledge my respect for the DC art community, I asked Sarah Tanguy to curate an exhibition of

Washington area artists, each of whom has exhibited at the Museum, either in a group or one-person show. These

fourteen artists represent the outstanding talent and commitment prevalent in the nation’s capital.

This exhibition was made possible by the generosity of the following sponsors: Aon Huntington Block Insurance;

Giselle and Ben Huberman; Frederick P. Ognibene; and Marsha Mateyka Gallery.

Judy A. Greenberg

Director

K@20 THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

CURATOR’S STATEMENT

In 1959, David and Carmen Kreeger began acquiring art in earnest, buying works by Renoir, Corot and Courbet

during a summer vacation in Europe. Over the course of the following decades, the couple assembled an

international collection of paintings and sculptures from 19th and 20th century Western, African and Asian art

which included important works from Washington, D.C.

The Kreeger residence, situated on five wooded acres, was designed by noted architect Philip Johnson for the

Kreegers’ art collection and life style. The building is a modernist masterpiece that opened as a museum in 1994.

Twenty years later, K@20 recognizes the Museum’s rich history. Encompassing a broad range of aesthetic

approaches and media, this exhibition reflects an individual engagement with one or more aspects of the original

collection and architecture. From installations, paintings, sculptures, and works on paper to video, the selection

offers a fresh perspective, not only on individual practices, but also on the collective strength of Washington’s art

community—and honors Carmen and David Lloyd Kreeger’s legacy and the Museum’s future.

The importance of color and abstraction is evident in the works of Gene Davis, Sam Gilliam, Tom Green, and

Dan Steinhilber. The significance of nature and landscape painting echoes in the works of Kendall Buster,

Jann Rosen-Queralt, John Ruppert, Jim Sanborn, and Yuriko Yamaguchi. The role of narrative, travel and daily life

informs the works of William Christenberry, Ledelle Moe, Michael B. Platt, Jeff Spaulding, and Renée Stout. Evident

throughout is an artistic passion, which coupled with intellectual curiosity, yields works that transcend particular

circumstance in surprising and innovative ways.

Sarah Tanguy

K@20 THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

THE KREEGER MUSEUM20th Anniversary Exhibition

K@20

KENDALL BUSTER (born 1954)

“My initial study in microbiology and my interest in the history of architecture

have resulted in works informed by both geometric and biological morphologies

and operate in the territory where architecture and biology might meet…

Designs that suggest germination, budding, merging, hybridization, or

absorption are central to my work.”

The wonder of nascent life animates Kendall Buster’s sculpture and drawing. With

consuming passion, the artist examines cellular structures, and from their revealed

secrets, synthesizes her own enigmas into being. No matter the scale, her intricate

constructions create an intimate experience that envelops the viewer and invites

penetration, virtually in the drawings and smaller pieces, and physically in the

larger sculptures. The prints in Bloom Sequence are part of Parabiosis III, a project

that explores the idea of a living city or an architectural work unfolding like a bud.

Arranged in a minimalist grid, the prints are based on individual frames from a 3-D

computer animated film. Like Edward Muybridge’s motion studies, they chronicle

the transformation of a structure/organism from seed to full blossom. The pink

printing paper lends a flesh-like quality and brings out a latent sensuality in the

satiny black shapes. The related sculpture, made out of steel and shade cloth,

extends the idea of a porous refuge capable of merging into the surrounding

landscape. In contrast to conventional urban development through modular

accumulation, Buster proposes growth through singular or shared evolution. In

her model of a seed city, the ecology of physiological and architectural states

cross-fertilize—resulting in an expanded perspective of our relation to both our

natural and made environments.

Kendall BusterBloom Sequence, 2014digital prints, Epson K3archival ink on EpsonVelvet Fine Art Paperoverall: 6'x 10',each: 8.5" x 11"Courtesy of the artist


K@20

WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY (born 1936)

“Everything I want to say through my work comes out of my feelings about that

place—its positive aspects and its negative aspects. [Hale County] is one of the

poorest counties in [Alabama] but it is also a county with great lore and legend.”

To understand William Christenberry, one must grasp the fundamental significance

of Hale County, Alabama. Though born in Tuscaloosa, a few miles north, the artist

travels annually to this region, a pilgrimage that inspires the natural, architectural

and figurative references of his haunting imagery. Like a Southern Gothic novel, his

art addresses such grand themes as the passage of time and our struggle with

nature, and in his Ku Klux Klan-related work, the evil that humans wreak on each

other. Often his photographs juxtapose an initial view of a pristine building in a

landscape with subsequent ones of it crumbling or being overcome by kudzu.

His lyrical drawings, including Untitled (August 8), present a more distilled

interpretation of space. Akin to the spontaneous economy of Zen Buddhist

painting, their restless marks and forms are rooted in the gestural bravado of his

earlier abstract expressionist work, yet bear the traces of gourds, branches, and

fence lines. In contrast to the drawings’ airy atmosphere, his sculptures emphasize

material presence. Southern Monument XXII, featuring a small sheet metal building,

ladder, gourd, ball, and red soil, recalls the silent mystery of Giorgio de Chirico’s

tableaux. Here as elsewhere, Christenberry channels nostalgia into the creation of

memory, challenging both his own recollections and those we share together.

William ChristenberrySouthern MonumentXXII, 1989steel, wood, paint,mixed media,and red soilsculpture: 22" x 12" x 12"tray: 3" x 24.5" x 24.5"pedestal:36" x 24.5" x 24.5"Courtesy ofHEMPHILL Fine Arts


K@20

GENE DAVIS (1920–1985)

“The subject of my work is color interval, the space between colors. And this is

just as valid a subject matter as the proverbial nude or bouquet of flowers.

Stripes are simply the device by which I define color interval.”

There is magic about Gene Davis’ stripe paintings. The way they pulse, the way

their oscillations engage our perception in endless optical games. As the artist

was wont to suggest, pick a color as a point of entry, and then pay attention to its

width as it interacts with its partners. Relying on his intuition—Davis had no

academic art training, he chose his colors randomly from a pile of acrylic tubes on

the floor—his sense of color was influenced by works of the Impressionists and

Paul Klee. By contrast, he was deliberate in laying down lines, whether he used

masking tape, pencil, or ruler. He thought carefully about intervals and achieved

rhythms that unfold over time like a musical score. Harnessing the inherent

properties and rich evocative power of line and color, Davis answers the old

debate about their relative importance by joining them in a pure and direct

fashion. In the 1982 Concord, black and red bands of varying width play off the

blank canvas as they stop short of the edge and create a framing outline; whereas

in an untitled 1985 painting, freely drawn, narrow bands of purple bleed into each

other and barely contain a smaller painting of azure and black stripes. Throughout

his career, Davis never tired of repetition, and his countless variations of the stripe,

vertical for the most part, retain their impact on younger generations.

Gene Davisuntitled (P7), 1985acrylic on canvas55" x 80.75";framed: 70.75" x 97.25"The Estate of Gene Davis,Courtesy of MarshaMateyka Gallery


K@20

SAM GILLIAM (born 1933)

“You have to ask yourself what kind of artist you want to be. I had to get out

on a limb and then decide how I wanted to get back. You have to constantly

challenge yourself to find inspiration and to learn how to work. That’s the

most important thing.”

Restless experimentation guides Sam Gilliam’s quest to meld painting and

sculpture and upset the conventional framed canvas. From his drape to his

hinged-panel works, he continues to innovate in the way he juxtaposes accident

and control, back and front, hard-edge and free-form, never losing sight of the

importance of the gesture and the hand. The artist tends to work on several

paintings at the same time so he can find emerging relationships, as Screen forModels III, II, and I attest. From a distance, the triad appears as one syncopated

composition whose flow reflects Gilliam’s stream of consciousness and jazz’s

improvised rhythms. Closer viewing reveals complex stratification and joinery.

Akin to the folded dimensions of quantum physics or an epic-scaled puzzle, the

paintings take on the depth of galactic space. They draw you to wonder, “What’s

behind the openings, or if I were behind, what would I see looking out?” in the

artist’s words. Boldly hued passages bleed into earthy swirls as they butt up against

vertical bands of divided color and stenciled overlays that resemble cracked ice.

All the while, the dazzling interplay of paint application and wood grain brings the

viewer back from a flight of fancy to the palpable reality of the work.

Sam GilliamScreen for Models III,2012acrylic on birch80"x 45"Screen for Model II,2012acrylic on birch80"x36.5"Screen for Model I,2012acrylic on birch80"x45"Courtesy of the artist


K@20

TOM GREEN (1942–2012)

“I like to make my art ambiguous to keep things open to interpretation.

The best response to a painting is to get into it as a child would—not trying

to interpret it but reacting to it at an emotional level.”

Guided by instinct and curiosity, Tom Green transformed what caught his eye into

ideas and images that transcend the everyday and operate on an elemental level.

Above all, his work is about communication. Over the course of his career, he

honed an idiosyncratic lexicon of narrative symbols that play off the abstract

geometry of his compositions: each glyph is unique and each stands for an

individual thought. With traces of the familiar, these glyphs offer clues to a

storyline for the viewer to complete. His hermetic approach to subject counters

the transparent simplicity of his technique, whose air of effortlessness belies

underlying problem-solving and intensive labor. Eschewing tape, Green occasionally

used pencil lines to demarcate form, while remaining faithful to a one-inch brush

like a musician to his preferred instrument. Nowadays brings together several

compositions linked by bands of color and what looks like a door and a staircase

seen in profile. Echoes of motifs explored in other works, including his trademark

glyphs, a couple of symmetrical shapes, and a stone wall, this time pierced by a

red window whose bars create the dollar-sign, are synthesized into something

new. Typical of Green’s practice, the painting offers intense visual pleasure while

fulfilling his dream of engaging the mind in open-ended play and meditation.

Tom GreenNowadays, 2010acrylic on canvas66" x 78.125"Courtesy ofLinda Green


K@20

LEDELLE MOE (born 1971)

“Most recently, I have been exploring notions of monumentality and the human

form. With a process that begins with the digging and gathering of soil from

various locales and progresses in the studio through such actions as welding,

casting, modeling, and carving, I create female figures in order to open up

narratives that speak through both image and materiality.”

Arresting in visceral beauty, the colossal figures in Ledelle Moe’s Transitions/Displacements appear to draw inspiration from the classicism in Maillol’s luxuriant

female nudes and the modernism of Philip Johnson’s nature-inflected architecture.

But unlike their sense of static permanence, Moe’s three “ladies”—as the artist calls

them—are on the go. With soil from her native South Africa mixed into their

concrete shells, they perform as temporary markers of their current site while

claiming the memory and history of their place of origin. Their semblance of

hovering just above the earth adds to the feeling of motion, despite their massive

presence. They also harken to Moe’s personal life. Based on images of her

grandmother, the figures memorialize her family’s transient roots like ancient

funerary statues. A pack of birds, clustered atop one of the figures, further suggests

the migratory patterns of living beings as well as the developmental cycle of a

form multiplying and then becoming a single body again. Throughout, a sense of

symbolic expectancy reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf pervades: land and

human, the collective and the individual coalesce into a vision of shared belonging

and identity, if only for a moment.

Ledelle MoeTransitions/Displacements(one figure of three),2011-12concrete and steelEach large figure (2):4' x 18' x 3';figure with birds:3' x 10' x 3’Courtesy of the artist


K@20

MICHAEL B. PLATT (born 1948)

“For the past several years, my imagery has centered on ritual and the

transformation of the human spirit that occurs when it confronts imagined

or actual events and circumstances.”

Long known as a printmaker, Michael B. Platt now prefers the more expansive

designation of “image maker.” His unflinching, densely layered work focuses on

figurative studies of survival and marginalization in the context of history and the

vagaries of the human condition. Synthesizing found images with his own

photographs of travel, his home and models adorned with theatrical paint, he

creates digitally manipulated collages. Ambivalent stories emerge that fulfill his

inner vision. He also collaborates with his wife, poet Carol A. Beane, to produce

artists’ books and broadsides. The digital print We Always Met at Our Water Holetakes the Aboriginal peoples of Australia as its focus, their love of land and their

abuses suffered. The setting is a sweeping panorama where spirits and memories

commingle with the living. From an outsider’s point of view, the land appears

barren but for indigenous dwellers, the land is rich in river roads and desert oaks.

Standing in a waterhole, a female figure signifies fecundity and highlights water as

a source of life and hub for communal activities. At the center, the image of an

elder from the Torres Straits Islands wears a token badge of authority given by

settlers. And to his left, the face of an unknown inmate from the former Newcastle

jail floats in the azure sky. Through varying perspectives, Platt draws parallels

between the African-American and the Aboriginal experience of colonialism,

inviting personal introspection of our collective history and its lasting impact.

Michael B. PlattWe Always Met atOur Water Hole, 2013digital print onadhesive fabric60" x 119"Courtesy of the artistand Tim Davis ofInternational Visions –The Gallery


K@20

JANN ROSEN-QUERALT (born 1951)

“Water, the essence of life, has been the focus of my creative practice…to

create awareness of our reliance on it, its forms of beauty and glory, then to

mentor how we can move within it.”

In her practice, Jann Rosen-Queralt seeks the poetic and the mythic latent in the

science and technology affecting living eco-systems. Whether public or private,

her work reflects an avid curiosity and abiding commitment to sustainable design

and environmental revitalization. With water as the unifying thread, IntermezzoSuite, a triptych of quiet interventions at The Kreeger, converses with David and

Carmen’s travels and collecting patterns as well as with Philip Johnson’s

architecture, in particular, Johnson’s desire to bring the outdoors inside and his

attention to materials and framing views. In Part I: Cleansing, soap bars from cast

oysters in the Museum’s public restrooms raise the idea of sanitation, purification

and ritual in the context of a common, domestic setting. A companion label

explains the filter-feeding mollusks’ source in the Chesapeake Bay and their vital

relationship to water detergency. Activating one window of the Museum’s interior

garden, Part II: Sustenance presents a photograph of a whale shark filtering water

as it feeds on plankton. Here the flora of the man-made tropical rainforest lends a

natural frame while evoking the shark’s habitat. In the library, a video, titled Part III:Procession, blends footage of water-related systems, inherent in Johnson’s design,

with light and color found in works from the collection into an abstract composition

of its own. Appealing to both mind and heart, her installations about caregiving

and regeneration pierce the confines of everyday reality and urge us to rethink our

place in the world.

Jann Rosen-QueraltIntermezzo Suite Part II:Sustenance, 2014Duratrans digitalphotograph, held bymagnets on the window52" x 45.5"Courtesy of the artist


K@20

JOHN RUPPERT (born 1951)

“I am interested in the relationship between natural systems and human

decision-making, and the paradoxes that lie between.”

Inspired by the Hudson River School and Earthworks, along with his childhood

trips to Middle Eastern archeological sites, John Ruppert has examined natural

phenomena using a range of materials, from sand and mud, chain-link fabric and

cast metals, to light, photography and video. Through keen observation, he

harnesses the forces in both violent and quiet events including lightning and

glacial flow. Resulting works brim with newly-invented wonder while retaining a

sense of nature’s awesome power. No longer mere artifacts or records, his works

become instead a kind of fossil existing in the here and now. The grouping, CastIron Thunder Bolts, bears witness to the effects of a storm on three tree trunks.

Shown without pedestals as the sculptor Constantin Brancusi pioneered, the trees

stand again through the casting process. Their spindly upward gestures evoke the

work of Alberto Giacometti, while their craggy edges, augmented by flashing,

bear evidence of the artist’s hand. Cast Iron Split Rocks is based on a rock split

into three parts by a hydraulic machine at a quarry. Playing with the notion of

verisimilitude, they confound with their seeming mass and challenge the viewer to

pay close attention to such telling differences as seams, cracks and material. Here

as elsewhere, it is the dynamic between the work’s frozen spontaneity and the

artist’s experimental practice that unleashes hidden energy.

John RuppertCast Iron Thunder BoltsVertical Strike, 200914' x 3' x 3'Split Column, 2009108" x 10" x 4.5"Wing, 200814' x 3' x 3'

Split Boulders, 2011-13cast iron and rocks42" x 43" x 29" (each),37" x 21" x 24" (each),35" x 41" 20" (each)Courtesy of the artist


K@20

JIM SANBORN (born 1945)

“My installations exploring the relationship between pure science and

technology use science not just as a starting point but also integrate tools

associated with science into their design. These interpretations of the events,

and more importantly, the influence of the visual context of these moments,

remind us of the risks, rewards and complexities of the decision-making

processes involved.”

Through extended research and observation, Jim Sanborn creates emotionally

charged works of exacting detail that straddle the intersection of art and science.

After studying archeology, paleontology and art history as an undergraduate, he

switched to sculpture for his Master of Fine Arts degree. His initial works featuring

petrified trees and lodestones, among other materials, wrestled with the invisible

forces of nature. Later projects focused on man-made coded systems that played

with encrypted text of his creation. In the late 1990s the artist turned his attention

to landmark scientific experiments. His first endeavor was constructing a labor-

intensive tableau that interpreted the 1944 Los Alamos Program. More recently, he

has constructed versions of machines used in the 1939 particle accelerator at the

Carnegie Institute’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. In the video Hydra, a

block of CO2 itself an outgrowth of his Cloud Chamber installation about nuclear

fission, appears against a black, featureless void. Resting on a barely perceptible

sheet of black rubber, the solid emanates serpentine vapors made visible by two

opposing beams of light. The companion audio begins with the rustling of wind

then changes to sounds of moving and melting Artic ice. Harkening to its

namesake—the mythological Hydra and her poisonous breath and blood, the

video counters its ominous message with mesmerizing beauty and dark mystery.

Jim SanbornHydra, 2010HD video of dry icewith Arctic icesoundtrackCourtesy of the artist


K@20

JEFF SPAULDING (born 1947)

“I hunt in the inner city and explore flood plains for cast-off objects that contain

a social identity but that also trigger charged psychological associations.

I combine or remake objects, looking for the buried poetry to emerge.”

Jeff Spaulding’s anthropomorphic sculptures upend expectations of the familiar in

strange and cheeky ways. A perpetual scavenger, he transitioned from the natural

landscape to the urban environment some 15 years ago, favoring toys and other

domestic items. Childhood memories of building forts and making things à la

Robinson Crusoe have remained constant. A sense of spontaneous generation

activates his current assemblage, where the formal relation between parts and

joinery are paramount to meticulous construction. In the spirit of Comte de

Lautréamont’s famous edict—“as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing

machine and an umbrella on an operating table”—his reductive hybrids embrace

juxtapositions and jumps in scale, oscillating between what they were and what

they have become. In Virgin Territory for example, the inversion of two white

lampshades, hourglass style, with a red ball wedged in between, conjures images

of a boudoir, a bare mid-drift and a butt crack; whereas, in the wall-mounted

Double Back, two plastic orange gaming bats, fat ends pointing upward, are

arranged side by side and linked by a “u”-shaped chrome steel bicycle part. Riffing

on their original connotations, Spaulding makes fragments whole again, and

endows them with new life and meaning. Emotional and often subversively sexy,

his works expose the lost innocence and insatiable desire of our throwaway

culture with elegance and wit.

Jeff SpauldingVirgin Territory, 2013fabric lampshades,rubber and steel21"x 13"x 12"Courtesy of the artistand Curator’s Office


K@20

DAN STEINHILBER (born 1972)

“Regarding the adulteration of ‘pure form’ I wish to leave my works open to

imperfection, complexity, free association, real life.”

Dan Steinhilber presents sculptures out of the material of everyday life. The works

may evolve over time, record the act of their own creation, or confront our

relationship to aging while engaging a sense of potential through the experiential.

Some are composed in multiples from the likes of Styrofoam peanuts and papered

coat hangers; others are contraptions delivering kinetic motion transformations; and

still others are room-sized environments you enter and experience. His 2012 project

at The Kreeger, Marlin Underground, merged found objects and their sounds,

sculptural space, and musical composition. The untitled floor installation he created

for the museum’s 20th anniversary—a kind of landscape of spent latex balloons—

playfully expands on scatter pieces pioneered by Process artists. The balloons are

remaining artifacts from his "balloon paintings," a series of installations from the

last decade. In these, the artist inflated thousands of balloons and composed them

across a painter's wooden stretcher into twisting layers and bulging configurations

that for all their inflated exuberance, simultaneously contracted. Steinhilber recalls

the balloons creaking and shifting, and occasionally popping as the material

adjusted itself and slowly deflated over time, their glossy finish turning mat and

their color increasing in saturation. In the current presentation, the artist dumped

out the spent balloons on the floor and orchestrated a condensed topography of

riotous palette —airing out his ten-year collection of decomposing balloon

installations from their storage confinement in a metal trash can he considers part of

the work. Suggestive of a three-dimensional pointillist painting or a deconstructed

color field abstraction, the piece offers an ambivalent image that turns a landscape

of decay into a vision of renewal or a synthetic form of the transcendent.

Dan SteinhilberUntitled, 2004-2014latex balloons, trash canCourtesy of the artistand G Fine Art Gallery


K@20

RENÉE STOUT (born 1963)

“The common thread running through bodies of my work is the continuing

need for self-discovery and making sense of the human condition and the ways

in which we relate to each other. These attempts have been both cathartic and

empowering. At this time, my alter ego Fatima Mayfield, a fictitious herbalist/

healer/seer, is a vehicle to role play in order to confront the issues of the day,

whether it’s relationships or current social and economic situations, in a way

that’s open-ended, creative and humorous.”

Renée Stout operates at the crossroads, the liminal zone where fact and fiction,

sacred and secular, and Africa and America intersect. Her narrative tableaux, be they

sculptures, prints, or installations and, more recently, photographs and films, explore

relationships and love, through frequent use of surrogates of her own invention. A

central theme is Vodou. Originally brought over by slaves from West Africa, the

creolized, polytheistic religion abounds in rituals and devotional objects. Another

reference is the city of New Orleans, whose rich history and folklore continue to

inspire her. She is especially drawn to made-for-tourists shops in the French Quarter

that peddle in “so-called” Vodou charms. A prime example is Reverend Zombie’s

store where she became friends with the owner. During one of her trips, the owner

asked her to transform the face of a Latino dummy with African-American features,

which she did, imagining herself a plastic surgeon. That figure is now part of the

center display above the store entrance. The screen print Reverend Zombie’s is

based on her photograph of the window front and bears the inscription, “Come On

In And Shop For A Spell.” Myriad traces of figurines and text dissolve into each other

forming a haze of reds and greys that parallels somewhat humorously an outsider’s

fuzzy understanding of Vodou. As though casting a spell, the ghostly image attests

to the endurance of the African-American legacy and above all, our will to believe.

Renée StoutReverend Zombie's,2011screen print withpigment and waxon paper mountedto canvas45" x 64"Courtesy of the artist


K@20

YURIKO YAMAGUCHI

“I see myself as an ‘ecophilosopher,’ someone who seeks to find the hidden

connections between everything, from nature to computers. My abstract

sculptures explore the paradox of how humans struggle with individual free will

in a terminally interdependent world with themes that include growth, change,

and vulnerability.”

At the core of Yuriko Yamaguchi’s sculptures is a focus on cellular structure. Rich

in metaphor, they combine disparate sources to generate fantastical images that

build on the power of their original material presence. Her recent experiments with

LED strip lights have led to greater formal flexibility and emotional effects through

warm and cool colors. Instead of preliminary drawings, Yamaguchi finds form

intuitively. In Blessing and Embrace, she first made colored resin casts of seeds,

coral fronds and other organic and man-made materials. Then, using stainless

steel wire over a fiberglass body, she interwove enveloping, translucent webs. In

both of these works, the idea of metamorphosis synthesizes above and below—

pods and corals become a translucent, undulating composite resembling an

amoeba or glowworm. By contrast, in E-Nest, the tenuous upward reach of an

overturned tree, which the artist found in her backyard forest, culminates in new

growth. A luminous egg, created by coating a balloon in animal gut, rests in a

protective cradle fashioned from roots and computer cable wires and chips. Ever

changing in identity, Yamaguchi’s delicate constructions suggest how the various

forces underlying the human condition—biography, nature, time, place, and

technology—bind us together in harmonious yet dynamic balance.

Yuriko YamaguchiEmbrace, 2013yellow and redhand-cast resin,stainless wire, LEDlights, and wood42" x 24" x 11"Courtesy of the artist

sarah tanguy - k@20kreegers’ art collection and life style. the building is a modernist...

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