'Wo/Man and Beast' exhibit shows artistry uncaged
By Virginia Wageman
Advertiser Art Critic
For viewing art by exceptional local artists, the Academy of Arts is the happening place at the moment. Inside the museum itself is the exhibition "East Is West" (reviewed last Sunday), focusing on cross-cultural influences in the work of Hawai'i artists.
Holding sway across the street at the Academy Art Center, a group of artists has put together a show of figurative works depicting women, men and animals, hence the title, "Wo/Man and Beast." This is a hip and funny show with attitude, but also one of substantial concept and execution.
Guiding light for the show was Kay Mura, who developed the theme and invited her artist friends to participate. Her own work previously focused on often fanciful animal sculptures. For this show, she has made animals — most noteworthy an immense wild beast — but she also has included humans for the first time, and with great success.
Her "Hawaiian Storyteller" is a group of five children and a large, stolid woman whose powerful bearing commands attention. The graceful woman in "Song of Myself" is imbued with so strong a presence that one can almost sense the reverberations of song emerging from her mouth.
Vicky Chock, whose wonderfully expressive ceramic figures of women in Japanese kimono are in the show across the street, here exhibits standing and reclining figures, all very decorative in their exquisitely patterned attire, in which the clay seems to flow and undulate as if it were actual cloth.
Jodi Endicott's wild beasts and women, modeled from ceramic, concrete and other materials, are both whimsical and grand, especially the two large boars that form an installation, along with a painting of two pigs. Here the males (the boars), though powerful in their three-dimensionality, appear almost subservient to the females that stand over them.
Working on canvas, K. Everett has created a comical depiction of woman vs. man/beast ("Mom ... Lucifer's in My Pool Again"); and working on paper, she has drawn accomplished nude figure studies in graphite and tempera. One group of the latter is framed in a room divider, cleverly creating a screen of nudes that might be used to screen one's nudity.
Kazu Fukuda's installation, "Self-Portrait: A Loss of Appetite," will probably need explaining for many viewers, though most will get the central component of a Hawaiian person's head served up on a platter, surrounded with fruits and vegetables and occupying the center of a table. Each of four place settings at the table has significance, not least of which is the unused setting, referring, the artist says, to one person (the artist himself) who refuses to take part in the feast. The concept here is dynamic, but the message doesn't quite make it through.
Jon Hamblin's large, unstretched canvases are covered with multiple layers of figures and writings expressive of love, intimacy and the human condition.
Here, the beast is within, as the artist struggles to define himself. One senses that if you asked Hamblin how he felt, he would paint you a picture. For the viewer, of course, the interest is in the universality of shared emotion.
There are about 10 paintings by Michael Harada in the show, all vignettes of local people taking part in the activities of everyday life — a woman smoking, a group of pig hunters, a dog pooping. He calls these his "I Love 'üiea" series. Lending a theatricality to the paintings, and thereby to the people and scenes depicted, are the pop-inspired, brilliant gold frames, influenced, the artist says, by a visit to the Louvre. Harada is a funny guy.
Rochelle Lum also has about 10 pieces in the show, most of them lovingly modeled clay figures of animals. In a tour de force of form, Lum has created several raku-fired clay pieces that incorporate the bust of a woman with figures of animals, the one merging seamlessly with the other.
For Fred Roster, the beast is a whimsical bronze terrier that holds in its mouth a long bronze branch topped with a light fixture: the beast is tamed by domesticity. However, his sculpture, "More Attached Than You Think," with an assortment of modeled male and female figures serving as spokes on a wheel, has a darker, Dantesque quality.
The quirky, intricate clay figures of Johannette Rowley demonstrate a witty sense of the bizarre, especially her two "Bodyguards" that accompany what is titled "Hand Bandit" — a long, narrow figure with slender hands emerging from its columnar body and two from atop the head.
Esther Shimazu, also represented across the street in "East Is West," here shows several of her signature clay figures. Her beautifully crafted nudes, fat and smiling, are sublime in form and expressive detail.
The mixed-media drawings of Maile Yawata depict young people who are at the same time hip and vulnerable. The artist's use of collaged cutouts adds a fractured dimension to the scenes, emphasizing the unsettledness of teenage years.
Cora Yee's "Cobra Sutra," a painting inspired by travels in southeast Asia, demonstrates a new palette for the artist. Here the colors, less vibrant than in her earlier works, have become deeper and richer, evoking the spirit of the earth.
Both "Wo/Man and Beast" and "East Is West" will be on view through April 15. Most of the works exhibited are available for purchase.
Virginia Wageman can be reached at VWageman@aol.com
