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Taizo Kuroda, Kumiko Namba, and Lisa Nankivil
August 24 - September 29, 2007
Opening reception: Friday, August 24, 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe
1011 Paseo de Peralta
Santa Fe, NM 87501
TEL 505.954.5700 FAX 505.954.5754
Hours: Monday-Saturday 10am - 5pm
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For further information contact:
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Taizo Kuroda belongs to a new generation of Japanese ceramists who are bringing a contemporary sensibility to traditional techniques and materials. “One’s first experience of Kuroda’s work is of precisely controlled vessel forms and an exalted spirit striving for restrained expression,“ writes Masanori Moroyama, Curator of the Crafts Gallery of the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. He also notes that while Kuroda’s monochromatic forms are highly personal, they have been refined from an intimate knowledge of the revered early traditions of China and Korea—from the delicate and thinly potted Ding ware of China’s Song Dynasty, to the pure serenity of Ming Dynasty vases, and the subtle deformations in the austere white porcelain jars of the Korean Yi Dynasty. Kuroda’s approach, however, naturalizes the cultural. Praising one of his vessels, Linda Inoki of the Japan Times called it “a timeless, serene piece with the natural loveliness of a bird’s egg or a seashell washed thin by the ocean.”
Japanese textile artist Kumiko Namba takes her inspiration from the calligraphic hanging scrolls that are traditionally displayed in a tokonoma alcove. Conceived in the spirit of traditional tokonoma scrolls that reflect seasonal changes, Kumiko Namba’s wall hangings are based structurally on specific poetic forms. By incorporating in the warp and weft the 5-7-5 and 7-7 metrical schemes of Japanese tanka syllables, for example, she creates a woven verse form—a pattern of tightly structured design and fine precise bindings. She has chosen the tanka form for the pieces in which she explores certain qualities or feelings associated with springtime and uses the senryu form for those related to summer. The wall hangings are spring and summer mood pieces, contemplating the brief and fleeting moments of revelation that we have with each passing day or season.
The striped format of Lisa Nankivil’s sumptuous abstract paintings evolved in 2004 while she was concentrating on certain figure-ground relationships in her work. “I was searching for ways to make the background as essential as the image,” she says. “I began to explore qualities such as motion, ascendance, and hierarchy through painted stripes, and eventually the image fell away leaving me to navigate the implications of the vertical and the horizontal by painting only the orientations with stripes.” A phrase in the art writings of John Berger—“Home is where the vertical meets the horizontal”—helped her as she began to explore the physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of her discovery. “To me,” she says, “this phrase refers to a sense of spiritual well being: finding ground in which to prosper.”
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