Opening Reception
March 11th - 6 - 9 pm
Sono Kuwayama: land(e)scapes (The Geography of Impermanence)
Ki Smith Gallery is pleased to present Sono Kuwayama’s third solo show with the gallery. The exhibition, Land(e)scapes focuses on the concept of impermanence. The show examines land and geology as a means of exploring the space between sameness and difference, real and imagined, empty and full.
The premise of land(e)scapes begins with stones, the shifting landscapes of terra firma, language, and the envisioned threshold of abstraction in ancient limestone landscapes and NYC sidewalks. “Untitled” (hollow rubber rocks), a series of cast rubber rocks is a meditation on emptiness, the hollows that create a shape (not the other way around). Each stone protrudes from the middle of a square. The rounded, almost luminescent amber colored spheres can be read as minimal sculptures creating space through the absence of the subject.
The idea of sameness and difference is further explored in a series of encaustic paintings depicting stones floating in negative and positive space. A solitary stone floats on an obsidian background, or the reverse, appearing on an impasto white field. Handmade encaustic paint adds a dimensionality that transmutes to a sculptural dreamscape.
Another series of over 150 exquisitely rendered watercolor rock and word paintings, portray stones with a fragile endurance. Like the encaustic paintings, all the stones are suspended in an emotive space. The word paintings in both Irish and English illuminate our relationship to our environments and how we perceive and understand the world we live in. These ideas are again examined in “Fragments in the Memory of Place” a soundscape produced by Ivo Hanak, written by Sono Kuwayama, Bob Holman, Larry Kirwan (Irish words) and Kathy Keane (English).
Kuwayama’s view of work as meditation melds beautifully with the tectonic shifts of the earth. Celebrating the eternity and impermanence of stone, Sono bridges conceptualism and organic imagery with her singular and spectacular subtlety.
- Ilka Scobie
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Opening Reception
March 11th - 6 - 9 pm
Further Geo_graphies of Impermanence : Tasha Depp, Day Gleeson & Carolanne Patterson
Ki Smith Gallery is pleased to present “Further Geo_graphies of Impermanence” curated by Sono Kuwayama, featuring work by Tasha Depp, Day Gleeson and Carolanne Patterson. While working across diverse media, the three artists provide a range of perspectives on how we relate to the environment around us. Depp is speaking to human engagement with the environment, while Gleeson investigates the environment reduced to foreground and background documented through her window. Patterson’s work explores place through our relationship to time, capturing ghost images of people and fauna on ephemeral natural materials.
In Depp’s work we are confronted by beautifully painted images paired with “trash.” Depp collects both trash and imagery from highways, parking lots, and stream beds, exploring our relationship to the environmentally challenged earth. Depp’s marriage of clumsy and discarded objects with exquisitely painted imagery invites us into an equanimous realm where these things make poetry together.
Gleeson spent the pandemic overlooking Sarah D. Roosevelt Park. The constrained and static cityscape as a constant slowly dissolved as familiar references to space and time receded. Their replacement was a breathtaking alternative— a liminal experience.The fence and trees became indistinguishable from their shadows. Their substance was a circadian journey and the only constant was the wandering of the orange safety cones beyond the window screen.
Patterson’s work began at a residency at the Silk Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia, where she accessed the photographic archive of the 19th Century Caucasian Sericulture Station. Using a laser engraver she began etching the archival imagery onto leaves and mica. These etchings became almost transparent, adding a heightened level of fragility to their delicacy. While Patterson’s pieces appear as though just plucked from nature, the ethereal images reveal a sense of time, place and history forged invisibly by modern technology.