ART-PRESENTATION: 5,471 miles

After long-term COVID-19 closures, Blum & Poe Gallery announced the opening of the Los Angeles and Tokyo galleries via limited reservations. The exhibition presented in both spaces, 5,471 miles, refers to the physical distance between these two hubs, and the defining criteria for focusing the two group exhibitions respectively on work by mainly local artists.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Blum & Poe Gallery Archive

The curatorial theme of the exhibition “5,471 miles” is a paradox in that it is both an internationally minded twin-city exhibition but is also inherently restricted to local practicalities via the travel and shipping obstacles of the pandemic. Few people would be able to name the physical distance between LA and Tokyo because it is so easily bridged by air travel; yet never in our lifetimes has that distance felt so far and so difficult to surmount. The exhibition in each city is defined equally by the works that are there as by those that are not there.

In Tokyo are on presentation works by: Kazunori Hamana, Kazumi Nakamura, Yoshitomo Nara, Kenjiro Okazaki and Kishio Suga.

Kazunori Hamana’s career has always been atyical. A natural shapeshifter, the Japanese craftsman created both a sneaker store and a fusion restaurant in Tokyo before moving to the countryside of the Chiba prefecture to work as a farmer and fisherman. While there, he began working as a ceramicist creating elegant, elegiac pieces firmly rooted in the country’s transcendent arts traditions. Inspired by his quiet life by the sea, the country’s world view of wabi-sabi, which embraces the imperfect, and his characterful aging farmhouse, Hamana’s vessels and sculptures marry centuries-old technique with an ebullient spirit. Each unique piece a masterpiece in its own way, Hamana sees his work as a bulwark against a contemporary culture infatuated with newness and products that are easily dispensable. Kazumi Nakamura began his career against the backdrop of the Japanese Post-Minimalism painting artistic milieu, which developed concurrently with American and European Neo-Expressionism. He entered the Tokyo University of the Arts with the intention to study art theory but soon found himself studying under Mono-ha artist Kōji Enokura, a mentor who encouraged him to focus on creating art. Nakamura subsequently developed a practice that draws on traditional Eastern depictions of space, filtered through a lens of American Modernism, (Zen) Buddhist thought, and post-structural philosophy. Yoshitomo Nara began his career during the decade he spent in Cologne, and from the mid-1990s he exhibited widely in Europe, the United States, Japan, and all over Asia. His return to Japan in 2000 coincided with a surge of global interest in Japanese pop culture, particularly in the United States. While he is primarily a painter, his practice encompasses drawing; sculptures made of wood, FRP, ceramic, and bronze; installations that incorporate scrap materials; and photographs that document everyday landscapes and the encounters he has during his travels. Since his first solo exhibition “Building through Construction” which presented the relief series “Akasakamitsuke”, Kenjiro Okazaki has been producing works at the forefront of myriad genres encompassing sculpture, painting, film, media art, architecture, textiles, stage art, picture books, tiles, and drawings by robots. What is even more extraordinary is the tremendous amount of activity Okazaki has pursued with equal enthusiasm as the making of artworks that far surpasses the normal scope of an individual artist: long-term scenery preservation endeavors like the Haizuka Earthworks Projects, or educational activities such as in Yotsuya Art Studium, in addition to the curation of exhibitions and the writing of criticism extending across various fields. The sheer broadness and depth of these activities sustained by fierce intellect may be ascribed to Okazaki’s effort to create not only individual works but also the very site where such works are produced. Kishio Suga works in multiple media, spanning site-specific installation, assemblages, works on paper, and performance. Suga moved to Tokyo in 1964 to study oil painting at Tama Art University, and soon after graduating in 1968 diverged from the mode of illusionistic painting that was popular at the time, and gained recognition for arranging natural and manmade materials in unprecedented installations. Examples from this timeframe include “Parallel Strata” (1969), a totemic enclosure made of paraffin wax, and “Soft Concrete” (1970), four vertical steel plates arranged into a square and shored up with a mound of oil-infused concrete.

In Los Angeles are on presentation works by: Alma Allen, Theodora Allen, Darren Bader, Robert Colescott, Sam Durant, Anya Gallaccio, Aaron Garber-Maikovska, Matt Johnson, Friedrich Kunath, Mimi Lauter, Tony Lewis, Dave Muller, Asuka Anastacia Ogawa,  Jim Shaw and Penny Slinger.

Alma Allen is a self-taught artist who began his practice by hand carving salvaged materials into unique small objects. Allen moved to New York in his early twenties and sold the miniature carvings on the street in SoHo, before catching the attention of designers nearby. After almost a decade in New York, Allen relocated to Los Angeles where he began designing furniture and creating large-scale sculptures. After repeated injury from obsessive over-carving left Allen unable to use his hands for extended periods, the artist built a robotic system out of spare assembly line parts and developed its proprietary software as a mechanized extension of hand-carving. Primarily constructed in stone, wood, and bronze, Allen’s sculptures are reminiscent of those by Constantin Brancusi and Isamu Noguchi, reflecting their ardor for experimentation, expressiveness, and originality. The paintings of Theodora Allen are quiet, restrained, and at times unsettling. Drawing from music, literature, myth and nature, Allen’s meditative compositions investigate themes of temporality and eternity, exploring a space between the physical world and an interior mindscape. In recent bodies of work, Allen has presented images of celestial bodies, moths and serpents, delirium-inducing plants, and string-less guitars emerging from geometric structures and reliquary-like spaces. The emblems are introspective and elusive, carrying the tone of despondency and the weight of existential inquiry. Darren Bader studied filmmaking and art history at NYU (BFA, 2000). He lives and works in New York and in transit. Bader’s conceptual hobbyhorses include: word works, pairings, impossible sculpture, misattribution, object fetishism, and trash sculptures. His exhibitions are often collaborative in nature, exploring and questioning the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate objects through complex (re)arrangements, surprise juxtapositions, and absurd associations. Over a nearly six-decade painting career, Robert Colescott  was a proud instigator who fearlessly tackled subjects of social and racial inequality, class structure, and the human condition through his uniquely rhythmic and often manic style of figuration. Colescott’s distinctive works, while not easily placed within any one specific school of painting, share elements of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, “Bad” Painting, Renaissance Painting, Neo-Expressionism, and Surrealism. Sam Durant is an interdisciplinary artist whose works engage a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. Growing up near Boston in the 1970s he experienced the radical pedagogy of A.S. Neill, Maria Montessori, and John Holt, along with anti-war demonstrations and the desegregation of the public-school system. Exposure to an educational culture emphasizing democratic ideals, racial equality, and social justice created the framework for Durant’s artistic perspective. Often taking up forgotten events from the past, his work makes connections with ongoing social and cultural issues. Anya Gallaccio studied at Kingston Polytechnic, London and Goldsmiths College of University of London. Recognized internationally for her work with natural materials to create site-specific installations, Gallaccio has consistently impacted notions of traditional sculpture. She engages organic substances such as trees, grass, flowers, fruit, and ice, enhancing their pure essence through sculptural form. Gallaccio’s sculptures are not created to capture one moment, instead she invites the viewer to witness the fluidity and impermanence of nature. The delicate and illusory appearance of her work encourages us to embrace the state and process of entropy, as the outcome of Gallaccio’s sculptures remains unforeseen, often even to the artist herself. The work of

Aaron Garber-Maikovska encompasses painting, drawing, performance, and video—interconnected modes of communicating a vernacular of somatic expression. Garber-Maikovska describes the site of the body and its role in making art not simply as a tool with which to navigate our world, but a centralized perceptive sphere of emotional, physical, conceptual, and spiritual inquiry. His  performances are set in private and public spaces, oftentimes in chain restaurants and mall parking lots. The artist approaches these cultural backdrops of late-capitalism, post-democracy, and neo-liberalism with kinesthetic investigations—gesture, rhythmic motion, dance and vocal utterances.  Matt Johnson’s work investigates the human desire to interact with the given world through science, mathematics, religion, art, and architecture. His exploration points to our inherent need to connect with the cosmos, our desire to understand it, and our attempts to manipulate it. The work uncovers poetry by accessing the potential of familiar objects, sometimes rendered via classical modes. Johnson’s instinctive humor and ongoing appreciation of art history are played out in materials both modern and timeless. Friedrich Kunath utilizes a personal style of romantic conceptualism, layering poetic phrases with poignant, often melancholy imagery. The work embraces comedy and pathos, evoking universal feelings of love, hope, longing, and despair. The artist’s personal journey from Germany to Los Angeles plays a key role in his work, incorporating German Romanticism and western popular culture, with still life, cartoon imagery, commercial illustration, nature photography and lyrical references. Mimi Lauter’s oil and soft-pastel works on paper assemble abstracted narratives drawn from subconscious memory, literature, sociopolitical surroundings, and classical mythology. For her first exhibition at Blum & Poe Los Angeles in 2018, Lauter presented a twenty-four part installation entitled “Sensus Oxynation” that functioned as the interior of a chapel—each wall a grouping of lush, highly chromatic works. Her practice proposes a secular relationship to spirituality in painting—belief in and devotion to the painting itself. In an ever-expanding engagement with drawing, Tony Lewis harnesses the medium of graphite powder to confront such social and political topics as race, power, communication, and labor. The material provides a literal and conceptual foundation for the artist’s work, as it is stretched, smudged, rubbed, spliced, and folded across a variety of handmade and found surfaces. Graphite powder is an inherently unruly medium, a substance that threatens to wander. Lewis nurtures this dispersal, allowing for the powder to build into a ubiquitous state that settles upon and indiscriminately marks paper surfaces; the graphite-slick studio floor becomes a “tool the same way a pencil is a tool”. Dave Muller creates paintings and installations that are rooted in his deep fascination with music, how it infiltrates and shapes our identities, and the communal dialogue it generates across cultures. Tapping into shared poetic moments and a collective dialogue, Muller depicts the myriad iconographies of his musical obsessions—album covers and spines, vinyl records, tapes, CDs, bootlegs, B-sides, disco balls, record labels, set lists, rare and popular instruments—sounds of all stripes, musicians, and singers, both beloved and unknown.

Asuka Anastacia Ogawa creates large figurative paintings that depict androgynous children in chimerical dreamscapes, otherworldly scenes formed from solid fields of color and flat picture planes. Her subjects have wide thin eyes that gaze forward, piercing the fourth wall. Ogawa conjures these compositions through an exercise that embraces unmediated impulse and channels the sense of curiosity, wonder and play paramount to childhood.  Jim Shaw is a multidisciplinary artist and an icon of the Los Angeles art scene. His work explores the countercultures and subconscious of American society, interwoven with personal history. Shaw grew up in Michigan during a time of great economic expansion—a time also known for the baby boom, the formation of suburbs, and the creation of consumer culture as we know it today. Along with the artist Mike Kelley, a fellow student at the University of Michigan, Shaw was a founder of the short-lived but influential punk-noise band Destroy All Monsters. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s to attend California Institute of the Arts and he is arguably one of the most notable artists to emerge from the school at that time. Penny Slinger has been exploring the connection between eroticism, mysticism, feminism, and art for over fifty years. Slinger mined surrealism in the 1960s and 1970s to plumb the depths of the feminine psyche and subconscious. She continues to work in many mediums including collage, photography, drawing, sculpture, and video.

Info: Blum & Poe Gallery-Tokyo, Harajuku Jingu-no-mori 5F, 1-14-34 Jingumae, Shibuya, Tokyo, Duration 21/7-8/8/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-16:00 & Blum & Poe Gallery- Los Angeles, 2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, Duration: 21/7-15/8/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blumandpoe.com

The galleries are open to the public through limited reservations.