ART CITIES:L.A.-Shio Kusaka

Each of the ceramic pots, bowls, and vases of Shio Kusaka rewards close looking. While the artist’s work maintains intimate ties to the traditional field of pottery, every vessel reveals unique touches, such as subtle imperfections and idiosyncratic surface marks. In some series, these marks take the form of grids, dots, chevrons, and parallel lines that engaged with the history of modern abstract painting.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Blum & Poe Gallery Archive

For this exhibition at Blum & Poe, Shio Kusaka establishes a narrative via a body of work comprised of varied shapes, textures, sizes, techniques, and motifs. Ceramic pots carved to resemble wood grain, porcelain beach balls, pots painted with grids and lines, and miniature porcelain animals, can all be understood as a response to Japanese ceramic traditions. Installed in the three main-floor galleries, on a seemingly continuous pedestal, Kusaka’s installation calls for each work to be considered within the context of the collective whole. While each pot does function as a stand-alone work, a certain rhythm emerges as individual works gesture to the whims of form and content of surrounding works. Shio Kusaka’s works take traditions of Japanese stoneware and porcelain as a foundation for historical fusions inspired by Iron Age ceramics, Minimalist repetitions, and the silt pottery of Ancient Egypt. These quotations merge with the subtle dimples, pinches, and other surface impressions of her haptic approach, as well as eccentric touches. Several works are glazed with imprecise grids (Kusaka softens hard geometries by allowing her lines to waver and overlap) while on tall glazed vessels colors ebb from dark green to white. Wood and Kusaka share influences and imagery but embark on autonomous explorations of their respective media, exhibited together, these symbiotic works reveal the autobiographical roots and layers of cross-pollination that inspire their creation. Individually, each sculpture is a distinct, independent work of art, yet the collective arrays of shapes and colors that comprise her installations become something else entirely, producing a meditative landscape evoking the rhythms of language or song.

Info: Blum & Poe Gallery, 2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, Duration: 2/7-20/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blumandpoe.com