Image: Japanese katagami stencil, Edo period (1615–1868). From collection of Katina Huston
Strength and flexibility depicted in Japanese design interpreted by contemporary artists.
K Gallery and artist/curator Katina Huston have invited artists across disciplines to respond to a classical form and concept in Japanese design; Bamboo. As a symbol of resilience, the plant “bends but does not break” and is equated with human fortitude. Artists will respond to a pattern of bamboo design found in Katagami, the fine craft of antique Japanese fabric stencils.
Artists:
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Artist Bios
Katina Huston is a mixed media visual artist working in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received a B.A. in the History of Fine Arts from New York University and earned a Masters of Fine Arts from Mills College in Oakland, California. Ms. Huston started life as an art historian and sculptor. She is best known for a body of drawings of shadows. Her work is represented by Chase Young Gallery, Boston and in the collections of the San Francisco Fine Art Museums, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Steve Wynn, Visa International, Charles Schwab, Clay Museum of Art, Charlestown, WV, Grand Hyatt, New York, Yale University Gallery, New Haven, Ct. Ms. Huston’s articles and reviews on contemporary art have been published in Artweek, New Art Examiner, Ceramics Monthly, New Mission News, Art and Conversations, Sgraffitto and Visions, Art Quarterly. She is occasionally on faculty at California College of the Arts in the graduate fine arts area, and other Colleges and Universities.
BlinkPopShift (aka M Eifler) is an American artist and researcher who lives and works in San Francisco, California. They make chimeras, things in between things. Using sculpture, performance, video and immersive technology they focus on navigating back and forth between different modes of thought and making in an effort to blur the strict categories humans are so fond of.
For this show a performance structure has been created for the audience to interact with an invisible sculpture via a transparent display worn on the head. Individually, audience members will get a chance to see the invisible and their act of looking will reveal the size and position of the sculpture to the rest of us. Using this scaffold our bodies become what is seen, what bends but does not break.
Takeshi Moro was born in Fukaya, Japan and spent most of his childhood in the UK. Moro attended Brown University, where he double majored in Economics and Visual Arts, while also taking photography courses at the Rhode Island School of Design. He worked in the fields of corporate finance and marketing/design before receiving his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Santa Clara University. He is the founder and director of tmoro projects, a 501(c)(3) non-profit community art space in Silicon Valley. He has participated in fellowships and residencies in Finland, Germany, Iceland, Japan, and South Korea. Moro’s work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Serlachius Museot, Finland.
Kaori Yamashita’s site-specific installations consist of elements such as sculptural objects, drawings, photographs, etc. They are usually placed in a particular environment in a rather unexpected yet precise way that makes each element purposely relate with each other, and hold a quality that could blur the confidence within the existence of physical matter. Recent exhibitions include: Leaves Without Routes, Nanmoncyo323, Taipei (2016); letter from the distant beyond, Künstlerhause Bethanien, Berlin (solo, 2015); Image of the Memory, Memory of the Image, BankART NYK, Yokohama (2014); Under Thread, Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (2007); First Steps: Emerging Artists from Japan, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2003); among others.
California Artist Dickson Schneider was born in Seguin Texas, 1955. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. After receiving his BA in Fine Art from California State University at Hayward, Schneider went on to earn an MFA in Painting from Washington State University at Pullman. “Painter, professor, gallery director, author, social practice/performance artist; all of these activities define my art practice. Current projects include The Free Art Project, begun in 2009 as an examination of art world status and privilege. The work in this show is a continuation of the “Holes in Naruto” a series of mixed media works derived from Japanese Manga.”
Dickson Schneider, Naruto Bamboo, 2017, 24″x36″ image transfer ink, pencil, acrylic and spray paint on gator board.