Modern Twist: Bamboo Works from the Clark Center and the Art of Motoko Maio

Saturday, May 01, 2010 - Sunday, September 05, 2010

The Crow Collection explores the intersection of tradition, innovation, and design this spring by pairing the traditional arts of basket making and screen making- the first a selection of works form the Clark Center in Hanford, California, and the second the exquisite work of artist Motoko Maio.

On Baskets . . .

Bamboo groves are quintessential parts of the Japanese landscape and are cultivated in the gardens of temples and houses. Since the 8th century, bamboo baskets have been used to hold flowers scattered during Buddhist ceremonies. Over the centuries, elegant bamboo containers were used during ceremonial tea presentations, called chanoyu and sencha, as well as in the art of floral arranging. For many years, bamboo works remained utilitarian in nature, and it was not until the mid-20th century that a small number of artists left the traditional path and experimented with more sculptural forms. These bold experiments in turn influenced the art of contemporary Japanese basket making.

The exhibition at the Crow Collection presents twenty bamboo baskets from the mid-1940s to 2008, with a strong emphasis on works from the 21st century. Some of these works have never been exhibited before, such as the new “Composition through lines” series by visionary artist Uematsu Chikyu, in which he experiments with forms that have openings that appear unfinished. -Andreas Marks, Curator

On Screens . . .

The folding screen of Japan has many facets beyond the physical attributes of its multiple panels. It is at once fine art, decorative art, furniture, and symbolic object. As an object of fine art, the screen replaces the single canvas of Western painting; as decorative art, it provides unparalleled beauty in an architectural setting; as furniture, it gives personal control and flexibility to space; and as symbolic object it expresses power, prestige, status, and cultural authority. First seen in European collections beginning in the 16th century, the folding screen, or byobu, remains an iconic representation of Japanese cultural aesthetics.

This spring, the Crow Collection presents the most contemporary expression of this traditional form in the works of Motoko Maio. Using traditional techniques and materials in dramatically innovative ways, as well as playing with form, Maio pays reverence to this stately art while totally transforming it and placing it securely in a 21st-century social and artistic context. -Lesley Kehoe, Curator

This exhibition is curated by Caron Smith, Andreas Marks, and Lesley Kehoe.

New Vision: Ballpoint Drawings by Il Lee

Saturday, May 22, 2010 - Sunday, September 26, 2010

Il Lee is a New York artist who for over 30 years has been exploring contemporary possibilities in drawing and painting in his chosen medium of ball point pen. In recent years his massing of looping, energetic lines have given way to more angular, more interrupted even more urgent, styles of mark making. His work is far-ranging. He has created massive monolithic forms on equally large canvases, as well as continually experimented in countless smaller drawings and with various grounds and integrations of line work and color. Lee’s rigorous approach allows the viewer to be sensitive to nuances created through the smallest of deliberate changes—a thicker line, a more compact swirl, a smoother ground. 

As with other contemporary artists legitimately extending the possibilities for abstraction, an interest in a particular genre is left behind. Remaining are concrete issues—within a commitment to explore the ballpoint medium are the possibilities of infinite approaches, so the most fruitful limitations must be set; certain evocative moods can be created through manipulation of line and form but summoning these moods with intent can lead to a sentimental practice so a focus must be kept on expanding the potential of the medium and not on using a reductive selection of tricks. As a result, and perhaps counter-intuitively, as well as being concrete exercises in how a medium depicts light, line, and form, his works also capture the ineffable. 

In exploring the language of modernism Lee has moved through minimalistic representation of line and form to a more abstracted language of kinetics. His progression is far from a retooling of modernist approaches and much more an exploration of timeless and contemporary concerns from within his own highly developed practice. 

Il Lee has been the subject of a critically acclaimed retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art and solo exhibitions at major cultural institutions including the Queens Museum of Art and the Vilcek Foundation in New York.

Organized in collaboration with Art Projects International, New York.