Latest news with #TakashiIwasaki
Winnipeg Free Press
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Idyllic impermanence
WHAT IT IS: Titled The Songs of Neocaridina and I've Got So Much to Tell You, these paired works by Winnipeg artist Takashi Iwasaki are hand-embroidered with cotton thread on black twill fabric. Vivid, vibrant, exuberant, they are part of Halcyon / Kawasemi, a two-person show now on view at Plug In ICA, featuring art by Iwasaki and Joe Kalturnyk. WHAT IT'S ABOUT: The exhibition's double title references a bird — a kingfisher — that appears in both a Japanese folk tale and a Greek metamorphosis myth. The bird was thought to lay its eggs during a brief winter stretch when the ocean's waters were calm, so that the phrase 'halcyon days' has come to suggest a time of peace and contentment. Born in Hokkaido, Japan, Iwasaki has been living and working in Winnipeg since 2002, when he came here to study at the University of Manitoba's School of Art. The 42-year-old artist's practice includes embroidery, painting, collage, woodworking, ceramics and large-scale public art — he collaborated with Nadi Group on that joyful light installation at the Kildonan Park duck pond — but whatever the medium, Iwasaki's art radiates beauty and happiness. Iwasaki's works in this show riff on sea creatures and birds, fruits and seeds, elephants and aliens. The Songs of Neocaridina and I've Got So Much to Tell You could be classified as biomorphic abstraction. Their rounded, organic shapes and crowded, multicoloured dynamism suggest not just individual life-forms — neocaridina is a type of shrimp — but the primal force of life itself, always reaching, growing, transforming. With their wandering lines and bright, pop art-inflected hues, the two works might read at first as spontaneous explosions of energy. But Iwasaki's needlework process is actually slow, methodical and painstaking, which makes for an interesting kind of tension. WHY IT MATTERS: There's another tension in these two pieces and in the show as a whole. The phrase 'halcyon days' suggests a time of perfect happiness, but there's also the melancholy implication that this moment is brief and passing, a temporary calm in a larger sea of tumult and trouble. We are living in times of tumult and trouble, and this is a halcyon show, a happy, cheerful, playful mood-booster, a jolt of pure emotional and physical pleasure. This includes not just Takashi's work but the interactive and immersive installation by Kalturnyk, which references the kingfisher's search for light in the Japanese tale but also — with its trippy use of colour and luminosity — seems to call up Lite-Brite toys, black-light posters in teenage bedrooms and glow-stick dance parties. Monthly What you need to know now about gardening in Winnipeg. An email with advice, ideas and tips to keep your outdoor and indoor plants growing. While this exhibition is packed with wonder and delight and out-and-out gorgeousness, it shouldn't be dismissed as escapism. (Respite, yes. Escapism, no.) There have been periods when art theorists have frowned on beauty, seeing it as serving the social status quo, papering over ugly realities, lulling viewers into easy complacency. Lately, though, many artists and critics have advocated for the radical power of joy and beauty, seeing them as tools for community, connection and transformative creativity. If you want to work toward a better world, you have to be able to imagine it, and that's what Iwasaki's art offers — a sudden, dizzying glimpse of human happiness. Alison GillmorWriter Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Winnipeg Free Press
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Playful creations conjured by friends on either side of studio wall
For more than a month, visual artist Takashi Iwasaki and artist/designer Joseph Kalturnyk worked on their joint exhibition Halcyon / Kawasemi together, but apart. In the galleries at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, the longtime friends and Nuit Blanche collaborators created art in their own spaces, knowing the other was just on the other side of the wall. 'It was really fun,' says Kalturnyk, who is the founder of RAW: Gallery of Architecture and Design and the designer behind the RAW:almond pop-up restaurants. PHOTOS BY MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS Joseph Kalturnyk's installation, Kawasemi, gives one the sensation that they are inside one of Takashi Iwasaki's Halcyon works. 'While Takashi's bending the wood and making his piece over there, I was in here, and I could say, 'Hey, check this out — what do you think?' It's like having a studio partner.' Iwasaki says he appreciated being able to draw on Kalturnyk's skill set, which is different from his own. 'He's got this architectural background, he was a contractor in the past, so he has lots of skills in building things and certain manoeuvres that I can't come up with,' says Iwasaki, who was born in Japan and moved to Winnipeg in 2002 and earned a BFA at the University of Manitoba. 'So when I ask questions, it's instant for him, and maybe vice versa in some instances.' But despite being created independently, both sides of the exhibition sit in conversation with each other. Halcyon is a retrospective of Iwasaki's art, with works from as early as 2005. His practice spans artistic mediums — oil paint, sculpture, embroidery, woodworking and ceramics — but the pieces that compose this exhibition are all united by two things: bold, riotous colour and a sense of play. MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS Takashi Iwasaki (right) and Joseph Kalturnyk checked in on each other while creating. 'I like things that are uplifting for myself and for the viewers, too. And organic shapes, biomorphic shapes rather than rectangles,' Iwasaki says. Indeed, the only square or rectangle you'll encounter in Iwasaki's work is the frame. 'I like the idea of organic shapes. I think that's something I really feel connected to, and probably it's the same for a lot of people. And sometimes it's also technical too. (Organic shapes) are technically challenging. Straight lines are easy to make,' he says. He references the famous quote from renowned 19th-century architect Antoni Gaudi: 'The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God.' 'I don't maybe use the same connection, but I feel something closer to that,' he says. PHOTOS BY MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS Despite being created independently, works by Takashi Iwasaki and Joseph Kalturnyk sit in conversation with each other. Iwasaki's sense of humour is everywhere. There is a curvy, free-standing sculpture painted in ocean blues he simply calls Floor Lamp since, very technically speaking, that's what it is. But it also looks like it could be found growing in a coral reef. He's not a landscape artist in the traditional sense, but his works look like landscapes you might find in the clouds, in outer space, under the sea or under a microscope. There's a liminal, floating quality to them. But he's also full of surprises, such as the large-scale lattice screens created using traditional Japanese woodworking methods. Those pieces are almost the inverse of the others: clean, grid-like lines, but they are framed out in ovals. The embroidered works are the most whimsical. Iwasaki picked up embroidery in art school and stuck with it — not only for its meditative qualities but the fact that, unlike paint, thread is already dry. Embroidery is also easy to pick up and put down as well as being incredibly portable, attractive qualities when, like Iwasaki, you have two young kids vying for your attention. PHOTOS BY MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS Artist Takashi Iwasaki (right) and artist/designer Joseph Kalturnyk are longtime friends and Nuit Blanche collaborators. Through neon-hued embroidery floss, Iwasaki can transform a mundane scene into abstract art. His 2009 embroidered work Haremeazorekenoboushi, for example, was inspired by a pal navigating a cold day. 'A friend of mine came with a ponytail. She had a fur hat and skinny jeans, and it was winter, and her one ear was red, but the other was blue. This is her teary eye,' he says, pointing to what looks like a small bird. Each of these elements exists separately from each other in black negative space. The ponytail looks like a tentacled figure, or the nipped-waist of a parka-clad woman wearing one red mitt and one blue one. The skinny jeans appear as bright turquoise slashes, extending upwards from a mint green eye with a pool of swimming-pool blue tears about to spill over a hot-pink lid. 'The colours are not realistic,' Iwasaki deadpans. Kalturnyk's installation Kawasemi gives one the sensation that they are inside one of Iwasaki's works. 'I felt like it would be really, really amazing to see one of his little figures in three dimensions, kind of floating in midair,' Kalturnyk says. And so, using UV light and little tabs of neon fluorescent tape, Kalturnyk created a three-dimensional shape suspended on a rotating spool of cords inspired by a Japanese folk tale about a Kawasemi (or Kingfisher) bird. For the designer, creating Kawasemi offered him a chance to use a different part of his brain. Wednesdays Columnist Jen Zoratti looks at what's next in arts, life and pop culture. 'I don't get to spend a lot of time in that (space). Most of the time, you come up with the concept, and you spend a bit of time refining it, and then the rest is just running around to get it done.' The installation was intended to be spun by hand. Here, it revolves on its own and can be viewed from the street. 'We adapted it for this show to be motorized, so that at night we can open up the curtains and it's a show for the cars,' Kalturnyk says. You can't take the public art out of the public artist. Halcyon / Kawasemi is on view until late July. Jen ZorattiColumnist Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen. Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
