James Jack presenting at Asian Studies conference

MA student James Jack will be presenting a paper at the annual Asian Studies conference held in Honolulu this week in the session "Post-Bubble Aesthetics in Japan: Counter-Urbanist and Slow Life Philosophies in Japanese Contemporary Art and Architecture" on Friday, April 1 at 12:30-2:30 pm

Jack's paper entitled "The Spirit of Place: An Artist’s Perspective on New Exhibition Formats in Japan" will present a first-hand perspective on regional art exhibition formats based on the artists’ experiences while participating in recent Japanese art festivals. Drawing upon examples from the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial (2000-Present), Ueno Town art Museum (2007-2010), and Setouchi International Art Festival (2010) Jack will present the social and historical context for the art projects that he realized in each locale. The movement of artists and viewers from urban centers into the countryside during these exhibitions could be seen as a revitalization of social landscapes plagued with the reality of declining birth rates and widespread urban migration. This presentation will discuss projects by Jack, beginning with a discussion of the work, "Mini-Landscape for Senda" (2009), a permanent installation work created in Niigata utilizing local soil samples. Next the exhibition Sustainable Art that was held in decrepit neighborhoods around Tokyo’s Taito-ku will be analyzed for its approach literally, “turning the streets into a museum” by transforming unused school buildings, abandoned storefronts, and empty

houses as exhibition sites. Finally the site-specific work created on Shodo Island in the Setouchi Inland Sea, "Language As the House of Being" (2010), will show the renewal of a historic fishing structure utilizing local materials in collaboration with members of the local
community.

Megan Bent: Orvis Artist in Residence at Honolulu Academy of Arts

Megan Bent, Sun Map from Pinhole Camera 3/25














Megan Bent, Light Map created inside Studio 30 HAA 3/27

MFA student Megan Bent is the current Orvis Artist in Residence at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. Her project Sun Maps of the Phenomenal started this past weekend on March 26 and will run until May 7, 2011.

" The purpose of this project is to create an installation, which will show the unique invisible phenomena of each museum visitor's travels through the Honolulu Academy of Arts."

Visitors to the museum can wear a pinhole camera to a courtyards of the museum. The sunlight will create a pattern onto the negative that represents the visitors movements. Visitors can also make long exposure photographs of their movements with light inside Studio 30.

You can visit Megan and create Sun Maps on Saturdays from 10 am - 4:30 pm and Sundays from 1:00 - 5:00 pm.

Also don't miss:
4/17- Bank of Hawai'i Family Sunday
4/29 - Art After Dark- 6:00 - 9:00 pm

Students and Alums Featured in "Contemporary Photography in Hawai'i 2011"

Friday April 1 marks the opening of Contemporary Photography in Hawai'i 2011 at South St. Gallery at Frame Arts Hawai'i.
Photographers from UH featured in the show are:
Brent Akana, Elizabeth R. Curtis [MFA student], Jordan Harrison, Ashley Katamoto, Natalie Nakasone [BFA alum], Chris Rohrer [BFA student], and Lenny Ushidate.
Opening reception is Friday April 1 from 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Exhibition dates are April 1 -30, 2011
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 9:30 - 5:30 pm, Saturday 9:30 - 1:00 pm

Kanako Nagai in Macau International Performance Festival

BFA Alum Kanako Nagai is among the participating artists in the Macau International Performance Festival 2011 at Ox Warehouse, Macau, China (March 11 - 12, 2011)

Niho Kozuru: Commissioned sculpture at Sheldon Museum of Art

Niho Kozuru, Transplanted, 2011

MFA alum Niho Kozuru was commissioned by the Sheldon Art Museum of Lincoln, Nebraska to create a permanent sculpture for their Great Hall. The resulting work, Transplanted was reviewed in the Lincoln Journal Star.

Maya Lea Portner at Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition

MFA Alum Maya Lea Portner's work was selected by Nathan Trotman, Associate Curator of the Guggenheim Museum, for inclusion in the Brooklyn Waterfront Coalition's Annual National Juried Exhibition - Wide Open 2 (March 12 - March 27, 2011)

image: Maya Lea Portner, History and the Common Chicken II (detail)

Wendy Kawabata at Root Division in San Francisco

Associate Professor in Drawing and Painting, Wendy Kawabata, has work in the group exhibition Manufactured Organic at Root Division in San Francisco.
"Working within the framework of a standard exhibition, Manufactured Organic encourages conversation about the environmental impact of the art world. Through progressively shifting their art practices to reflect a sense of ecological awareness, the artists included in Manufactured Organic pose sustainable solutions to the environmental issues inherent in exhibition process."

Manufactured Organic exhibition dates: March 9 - 26, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday March 12, 7:00 to 10:00 pm

Pat Hickman at Phoenix Gallery, NY

Professor Emeritus, Pat Hickman has work featured in River That Runs Both Ways at the Phoenix Gallery in New York, NY.
"Pat Hickman is working with what is found beneath the surface. When tree's fall into water, over decades they decay, eventually disappearing into the river bottom. What resists disintegration are the strange shapes formed where branch joined trunk, a cross-grained, pitch hardened core like a tooth in a human head. Hickman is exploring visual metaphors with these river teeth, the last part of the body to let go."
River That Runs Both Ways will be on display from March 2 - 26, 2011.

Suzanne Wolfe at TCM First Hawaiian Center

Suzanne Wolfe, Series of cups earthenware, cast under glaze and over glaze

Ceramics Program Chair and Professor Suzanne Wolfe has a new exhibition Cup[S] on display at TCM at First Hawaiian Center from March 4 - July 15, 2011.
In this exhibition, Wolfe will show more than 300 ceramic cups, each conveying a unique narrative through the application and juxtaposition of multiple image transfer.

Honolulu Printmakers 83rd Annual Exhibition

2011 Gift Print: Jared Wickware, Apparition

Numerous UHM Art Faculty, Alumni and Students were (again!) represented in the 83rd Annual Printmakers Exhibition:

faculty - Scott Groeniger

alums - Diana Jeon, Erica and Rob Molyneux, Deb Nehmad, Maya Portner, Dieter Runge, David Smith, Peter Suzuki, Paul Weissman, ....

current students - Ashley Katamoto, Mary Philpotts McGrath, Jessica Orfe, Jonathan Swanz ...

probably more... sorry can't keep up. ahhhh... the problems with success....

The exhibition runs from February 24 - March 18, 2011. I am sure you will find more.

UH Design Workshop in Honolulu Magazine

The UH Design Workshop was featured in the Calabash section of the Honolulu Magazine (March 2011 - Best of Honolulu issue).
[to download PDF]

Mary Babcock at the Textile Art Center

Teem - a collaborative installation

by Mary Babcock (faculty member and Chair of Fiber area) and Christopher Curtin

at the Textile Art Center, Brooklyn, NY (March 11 - April 19)
Opening Reception: March 11, 8-11PM

Teem, a large-scale installation, superimposes metaphors of water (movement/potentiality), and the sea (the infinite, comfort, danger, aloneness) to evoke a sense of dreamspace -- the space of possibility.

As artist Robert Irwin once noted, art is "the placing of...attention on the periphery of knowing", where logic and knowledge meld into a dream-like state. From this murky place of subjective experience, water emerges as a metaphor for the individual self caught in a colloidal suspension, drawn back together by forces of nature larger than ourselves. Teem uses textile
to create an environment where viewers find themselves under the surface of the water at the powerful juncture where river currents meet the ocean tides, where the individual meets the collective.

In a world that is increasingly reliant on "tele-presence", there are two aspects of our experience that are often overlooked: the sense of physicality, of touch and of physical-object-presence as we as its opposite, the void -- the palpable presence of absence. In this installation we bring the sense of poetry of the physical, undulating surface of the ocean indoors as w merge it with the beauty and history of the buildings' architecture. In doing so, we intend to shift viewers experience out of the compression of the everyday hyper-stimulating environment into the experience of spaciousness, into the potentiality of dreamspace, in the possibility inherent in the void.

Suspended horizontal planes of lightweight, translucent silk are blown by rhythmically timed fans as audience members are beckoned to lie beneath this "screen" of textiles that mimic the constant flux of the ocean's surface. Six shibori hand-dyed silk "rivers" rotate in negative space above the billowing white silk surface below. These "rivers" interact with the ocean as the large silk surface is gently blown up into their paths. Each is affected by the gentle caress that takes place, and the result is mixing of the diaphanous silk and the ephemeral, fleeting movements of the river above.

-From the "Teem" proposal, courtesy Mary Babcock and Christopher Curtin
Photo courtesy Mary Babcock and Christopher Curtin, from previous installation titled "Deluge"

Babcock's shibori silk pieces in the Textile Art Center's front windows has inspired a fundraiser for the recent tsunami tragedy in Japan.

James Jack and Travis Seifman

MA students James Jack and Travis Seifman are presentors at a Pecha Kucha event at the Center for Japanese Studies (Moore Hall 318) Friday, March 5 from 4-6.