|
|
|
|
|
Ninth in the series, the Woodmere’s Emerging Artists Exhibition gives some of us Northwesterners something to graze on in the winter months. This year they offer two young artists who hail from the ranks of the Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA). Shown together, they represent two opposites and the comparison is interesting. Chris Hartshorne rarely leaves his printmaking closet, which seems a hindrance to his skills as a draftsman and imagist, while Hiro Sakaguchi is all over the contemporary map making drawing, paintings, and mixed media. He also makes work collaboratively where he functions as curator. An ongoing project called Picture Journal features many known Philly artists. These small drawn diaries are made on Japanese schoolbook paper and are wonderful snippets of other artists’ ideas and images writ tiny. Hartshorne uses more traditional metaphysical references which link his work solidly to a long woodcut tradition. There is a little too much portraiture going on and it detracts from the other messages in the work. This guy certainly knows how to make a woodcut, but the subjects lack a new twist even if they are strong visually. In fact, Hartshorne’s work holds up from a distance, but one does not feel compelled to get closer, while it is imperative to make a close inspection of Sakaguchi’s delicate pictures. Proximity is a little awkward since, on the balcony of the Woodmere, one has no choice but to be up close as you work around the gallery or on the other side of the vast space. There is no doubt that the inclusion of Sakaguchi’s Cell-Phone Miniatures clinch the show. These small phones with tiny drawings in the image-screen intimate an animated world that seems transitory and faint as if it could disappear in front of our eyes. There is a mini-self-portrait, a mini-Mt. Fuji and another is called Memorial for Pet Fish Saki. There is a modesty here which belies the statement about commodification and what is handmade versus what is impersonal. Both artists utilize a certain degree of whimsy to great affect but Sakaguchi has the lighter touch. His narratives float (literally sometimes) between the cultures of his native Japan and his adopted USA, where he attended art school. In his work there lies a preoccupation with cultural displacement and a historical melancholy indicated by the pictures of airplane wings and the one of the battleship New Jersey next to a model of same. Hartshorne could easily turn his talents to sharper things if he would lose some of his focus on craft. There is much wit looking to come out as shown in his Dinosaur piece, Dino Greetings, and Go With the Flow, which includes two heads and a human heart. But expressive marks don’t necessarily equate with emotion or deep meaning. This show is a great example of where the weight of craft is vying with the lighter more elusive weight of contemporary practice, which can be charming but also can seem slight which leads to misinterpretation. The hanging of the works closely together alternatively adds to that duality. This leads me to believe it was not the best pairing since they are simply too disparate. Having said this, neither artist is prone to the slightest bit of irony which, in itself, is refreshing, and I see that there is something organic linking them. This series gives them both some needed exposure in the great Northwest and I look forward to the tenth go-around in 2008.
© 2007 James Rosenthal and InLiquid.com; image copyright © Hiro Sakaguchi and Christopher Hartshorne |
