| |
Maki
Tamura, Dawn, 2008, Watercolor on paper, 20 1/16"
x 20 1/16" x 3 1/2"
|
James
Harris Gallery is pleased to present our first solo exhibition by
Seattle artist Maki Tamura. For over the past ten years, the artist
has been using watercolor on paper to merge cultures through their
decorative artistic traditions. The concept of the Baroque implies
absurdity carried to excess. This idea characterizes the artistic
practice of Maki Tamura. The show will consist of five meticulously
constructed pieces that explore classical and rococo motifs found
in 18th and 19th century European decorative arts.
Tamura crafts objects that amount to philosophical incursions into
the nature of representation and history. With her intensive technique
of cutting, folding and gluing paper, laborious to the point of
obsession, the artist creates convincingly illusionistic reinterpretations
of porcelain vessels, manuscript illustrations and mass marketed
Victoriana. Two of the works titled Dawn and Dusk
consist of carefully cut roundels and polyhedrons creating elaborate
three dimensional structures. She then paints them with delicate
watercolor images of animals, flowers and cherubs. In Dawn,
these playful images are surrounded by a lush idyllic landscape
of a peaceable kingdom. In contrast, the landscape in Dusk
reveals a verdant contradictory world.
By
combining a variety of art traditions both high and low, Tamura's
finely crafted works on paper brings to fore an unseemly fantasy
that is characterized by its historical precedents. The sumptuous
works ironically question the beauty of ornamentation and aesthetics.
These provocative colorful multifaceted compositions are sweet but
never cloying and meld innocence with arch sophistication.
|
|
Please
click on thumbnails for larger images to open in a new window |
