Juror notes sophistication of show

By Victoria Gail-White
Special to The Advertiser

•	Artists of Hawai'i 2004 54th Annual All-Media Juried Exhibition Henry R. Luce Gallery Through Aug. 1 Benchmarks: Recent Work by Lonny Tomono Gallery 3 Through Aug. 22 Honolulu Academy of Arts 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays 532-8701

This year is no exception.

The show's content each year is determined by two factors: what is submitted and the criteria applied by the juror to judge entries.

Selecting a juror is no easy task, said Jennifer Saville, the academy's curator of Western art. A curatorial committee researches and chooses jurors who are sensitive to fine crafts as well as fine art. "Once selected, the academy lets the juror shape the show," says Saville. In previous years, there were sometimes three jurors per show and two shows a year.

The exhibit hit rock bottom in 1978 when a Mainland juror selected only 17 works by 15 artists; it soared in the two-part Art Hawaii I and Art Hawaii II shows in 1974-75, with Part I showing 140 works by 120 artists and Part II showing 153 works by 97 artists. The norm for the past 15 years was about 100 works.

"Maybe the fact that it ranges shows the variety we have had over the years," said Saville. "It makes one sit up and think about what we are seeing, and it tells us a lot about our community and the larger continuum of contemporary art."

This year's juror is Janet Koplos, senior editor of Art in America magazine. Koplos spent last October as an artist in residence lecturing at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa. She also is the author of a book on contemporary Japanese sculpture. Last month, she gave a fascinating slide lecture at the academy, "Japanese Contemporary Art: From Rocks to Rockets."

The largest number of artists ever submitted slides for consideration this year — 524 artists, 1,272 slides.

In April, Koplos got the huge shipment of slides in her office in New York City. "I was very rigorous in my selections, pulling out only slides I was positive I would want in the show," Koplos wrote in an e-mail. "It was only around 60! I went through a second time, reconsidering some that interested me but I hadn't been sure about, and nearly doubled the number."

On a later trip here, she saw the selections at the academy and made a second cut, which she said she was sorry to have to do but "you just can't always get enough information from slides." In the end, Koplos selected 96 works by 61 artists.

Koplos directed that certain works be grouped together — not something jurors usually do. "For me, that makes the show more 'alive,' as if these were families of ideas," she wrote.

Koplos based her selections on originality, coherence and persuasiveness. "But nothing's iron-clad," she wrote. "It's not unusual for me to throw out my biases, and that happened here. I would say that in general, I'm less attracted to figurative work than to abstraction, but you'll notice that there's lots of body-centered work in this show. It was just good work. It caught my attention and provoked association, made me think, held my eye. It persuaded me."

The new exhibition space in the Henry R. Luce Gallery is 4,000 square feet, almost 1,000 square feet larger than the former space. And this year, it's not sharing space with an invited artist, as in years past.

For the past decade, the academy has included either an invited artist in mid career or beyond (or group of artists, as in 2003) or the Catherine E.B. Cox Award winner — a young or emerging visual artist. This year, that winner is Lonny Tomono, whose work is being exhibited in Gallery 3 (see below).

The first Jim Winters Award was given to Tiare Dutcher for her haunting, tender "heartscape I," a plaster, cheesecloth and iron-rod sculpture of white, fragmented male and female body parts. This work was part of Dutcher's thesis exhibition at the Commons Gallery at UH last year.

Art aficionados may recognize many of the works in the show. Contributions by Eli Baxter, Deirdre Britt, Keiko Hatano, John Tanji Koga, Birgitta Leitner, Steve Martin, Deborah G. Nehmad, San Shoppell and others are back, and it is delightful to see them in this new context.

This year's exhibit is sophisticated, distinguished by the inclusion of a large number of black-and-white works.

"Though in generalæI saw more beautiful color in Hawaiian works," Koplos wrote, the number of black-and-white works surprised her.

She found the work comparable in quality to that in New York. But the overall tone was different. "If this had been 'Artists of New York'," she wrote, "there would have been lots of video and big photographs, and lots of work that's ironic or cynical or has an angry edge.

"I was interested in the tension between Hawai'i as 'paradise' and the sadness, decay and death that are inevitable parts of life. There seem to be a lot of works that have to do with distance or aloneness, in either an emotional sense or a physical one. Obsessive work and art that tries to take tradition to a new place also interest me, and Hawai'i offered its own particular instances of this. I was also impressed by several works with a local political message — bright, sometimes funny, but still packing a punch."

Metaphorical benches

Big Island artist Lonny Tomono is the eighth recipient of the Catherine E. B. Cox Award for excellence in the visual arts. His exhibit of five solid-wood benches is a metaphor for the meaning of its function and form.

"I thought they made a mistake," he said of getting the award. "I couldn't believe it. I feel honored."

Tomono's work is simple, spontaneous, primitive and thought-provoking, although it takes a quiet mind to appreciate the subtleties and magnificence of the huge hunks of lacewood, 'ohi'a and redwood. In this exhibit, he isolated the joinery, making the connections part of the sculptural aspect of the bench. He learned many of the complicated joinery techniques during his five-year apprenticeship with a master woodworker and fifth-generation temple builder in Kyoto, Japan.

Each bench was physically demanding to produce, weighing 700 to 800 pounds. Tomono rarely uses power tools; hammers, chisels, adzes, planes and saws are all he needs to achieve his mind-boggling geometric precision. This has the added advantage of keeping intact his meditative connection and respect for the growing tree.

"Wedge Bench" is a yin-yang sculpture with the lower part of the lacewood bench painted with black sumi ink. Long, filled-in, blackened cracks break through the golden grain of the upper part of the bench.

"Our Dark Bench" is black oil-stained redwood. In the center of the bench is a carved-out vortex. "It represents dark times," said Tomono. "For me, I like to do the piece and let the meaning emerge. I was trying to make the vortex like water or oil, into a whirlpool. It is a place to sit and meditate about our dark side."

Benches have many meanings. They are stopping places for conversations, courtships, meditation, reading, snoozing, enjoying nature and centering. Unfortunately, the full impact of these benches needs one more element — a living, breathing human body.