ART REVIEW
New works by six artists fete the dead
By Victoria Gail-White
Advertiser Art Critic
In Mexico, the Day of the Dead is an ancient festival dedicated to celebrating children and the dead, to remember the departed and the continuity of life.
Toy skeletons feasting in fancy suits might appear morbid to us, but not to those accustomed to the Mexican style of celebration.
'Day of the Dead'
Participants bake elaborate skeleton candies and cakes and decorate graves and family altars to commemorate their ancestors and acknowledge (in a humorous way) the cycle of life and death. It is a joyous occasion.
Six artists — Joey Chiarello, Mike Cueva, May Izumi, Jo Rowley, Franco Salmoiraghi and Esther Shimazu — have summoned up their own skeletons in new works to celebrate the Day of the Dead at workspace.
This is Chiarello's debut. His six ceramic skeletons are characterized by elaborate costumes (some are embellished with iridescent peacock feather parts).
Cueva's amulets illustrate a pre-contact language of the Philippines known as Alibata. The decorative calligraphic word kaluluwan (soul) is printed onto small pieces of wood.
Izumi overlapped the Day of the Dead with the Japanese Obon festival and created two "spirit vehicles" in clay animal shapes. The horse (also a cucumber) and the ox (also an eggplant) carry the spirit animals of a tiger and a boar on their backs.
Rowley's clay skeletons wear tutus, hang from trees and pop out of the wall in fragments.
Salmoiraghi's eerie and bizarre black-and-white photographs focus on snakes, lynchings and corpses.
Shimazu's clay figure, unlike her typical voluptuous figures, is slimmed down to the bone.
