WATERFLOW: ROCK, RIVER, SEA
Cotuit Center for the Arts, Cotuit, Massachusetts
July 15 – August 28, 2005
The Cotuit Center for the Arts is extremely proud to present WATERFLOW, focusing on the movement of light and water in literal, abstract or conceptual space. As a medium, water is light-loving and refractive, able to assume form in many media. This exhibition draws upon visualizations of water from both the East and West spanning the past four centuries. Water is the element of life, the primary source of renewal and regeneration. Nature provides the spirit of invention and discovery that inspires the work of all of the artists presented here. It can symbolize abstract concepts such as spirit, creation, time and transformation, especially as defined by Ananda Coomeraswamy in his seminal work, The Transformation of Nature in Art from 1934, a book that greatly influenced John Cage, Morris Graves and the Northwest Mystic artists. This exhibition is a tribute to John Cage, celebrating the deep personal connections between Cage and the exhibiting artists through Black Mountain College and The Mountain Lake Workshop.
The earliest works in this show are woodblock prints from the legendary Karacho workshop in Kyoto. The four fusuma, or Japanese sliding door, panels in this exhibition were printed recently, yet their original “sea wave” woodblock was carved by craftsmen almost 400 years ago. Morris Graves, the legendary reclusive painter of flora and fauna, was inspired by Asian art to create inventive images of nature represented in a single enlivened image, such as the coiled snakes and surf in his “Waning Moon.” In a similar fusion of eastern and western ideas, Shanghai artist Xiao Yan Gan adapts traditional single-brush painting techniques to create modern abstract variations of the classical Chinese subjects of Mountain and River.
American artist Michael Hofmann has lived in Kyoto for the past thirty years. Under Mountain Lake Dragon reveals his formal study of Buddhist Za-Zen painting under Jikihara Gyokusei, Japan’s foremost painter in the Nanga folk art style of sumi-e brush painting. The image of the dragon is a fusion of the essences of nine distinct creatures, and it is often displayed in Buddhist temples, signifying a heightened awareness of the transformative first principle of art – the emergence of the life force out of nothingness.
The “chance operations” that determine the formal process in the placement of river stones in John Cage’s New River Watercolors echo an interest in the random effects of the flow of water. Deceptively minimal, these paintings incorporate a myriad of decisions based on the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. Cage’s chance operations inspired the featured works by Kyoto Minimalist, Jiro Okura. His meditative sumi-e paintings were also inspired by the Shishendo garden, designed by the renowned 18th century Haiku poet, Basho. Okura’s “breathing lines” surround the negative shapes of scattered rocks and branches that may have fallen into the current of a “poet’s stream.” Artist and poet George Quasha’s commitment to the practice of t’ai ch’i and investigations into dynamic axial energy have led to his constructions of stones in perfect yet precarious balance. The axial stones were recently exhibited with works by Cage at Baumgartner Gallery in New York. Quasha’s stones are exhibited in counterpoint to early Chinese Scholar Rocks, revered for their beauty and physical manifestation of nature in transformation.
Ray Kass’ silk and water collages utilize flowing silk on layered mulberry papers as if it were a wash of watercolor. The diaphanous silk mimics the light-filtering ephemeral qualities of water. Kass’ large-scale watercolor paintings often incorporate the use of “smoked” papers, a technique Kass developed while working with John Cage. The random markings created by smoking the paper play beautifully with the washes of color and expressive brushstrokes inspired by rivers and oceans. They share in the spirit of the collages made from found materials by Irwin Kremen. These elegant scraps of weathered and water stained papers were painstakingly collected as found objects and then assembled into intense collages with an intimate yet ambiguously vast scale, creating a dynamic that fills the room.
Contemporary American landscape painters included in this exhibition use varied approaches to the transparent media as a means to evoke the luminous translucence and spontaneity of moving water. Susan Shatter, Robert Benson and James Wolf paint in watercolor in direct response to the specific locations in the natural environment. Susan Shatter’s relaxed brushwork belies her astute pursuit of a realistic motive. Robert Benson’s abstract spaces reflect his connection to abstraction in Native American design. His work draws upon the unique conception of space in his Pacific Northwest coastal tribal heritage. James Wolf creates abstracted visions of nature with flowing, overlapping washes of vibrant color. The nature of watermedia and the imagery of water form a unified and harmonious image.
Suzi Gablik creates elaborate and superbly crafted tapestries out of fragments of paper that celebrate the variety of life, layered complexity, and activity in Nature, revealing a vision of the that is psychedelic in intensity. M.C. Richards brightly colored expressive abstractions also celebrate the essence and transitoriness of nature with joy and exuberance. Also on view are Richards’ ceramics, about which she wrote her seminal book, Centering.
Jackie Matisse, like John Cage, is primarily interested in the role of chance and random movement in her art. Her kites are often created with performance in mind. The material evocations of “light-in-the-water” imbue her extraordinary airborne “Kite-tails,” some of which were even returned to the “Sea” in the underwater video collaboration “Sea Tails.” Completed in 1983 with filmmaker Molly Davies, “Sea Tail featured a special score by composer David Tudor. Matisse cuts and assembles pieces of fabric and paper to form the kite-tails. The kite-tails reference and react to the movements of air and water, exhibiting a freedom and life force. Most recently, Matisse has been involved in exhibiting her kitetails using high technology of super-computers and virtual reality.
John Cage met Morris Graves at the Cornish School of Art in Seattle in 1937. Graves introduced Cage to Buddhism and Zen, as well as aspects of Pacific Northwest Native American culture. Later in his life, Graves befriended Robert Benson, Native American painter, after moving to Northern California. Irwin Kremen, M.C. Richards, Suzi Gablik were all students and colleagues of John Cage’s during his participation in the innovative experiment in American education at Black Mountain College in North Carolina between the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ray Kass founded the Mountain Lake Symposium and Workshop in 1980, where John Cage was a frequent visitor, as were Gablik, Jiro Okura, Xiao Yan Gan, M.C. Richards and Susan Shatter. One of the most recent participants in the Mountain Lake Workshop was Jackie Matisse, close friend of John Cage. George Quasha knew Cage and his circle well, and published, through his Station Hill Press, the collected poems of M.C. Richards.
This exhibition was curated by Virginia Sassman, adjunct curator for Zone: Chelsea Center for the Arts, New York. For more information about this exhibition, please contact James Wolf of the Cotuit Center for the Arts at 508-428-0669. The Cotuit Center for the Arts is a non-profit fine and performing arts institution located in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Hours are from 10:00 am to 4:30 pm Monday through Friday, and Saturday from 12:00 pm to 4:00 pm or by special arrangement.
The Cotuit Center for the Arts
P.O. Box 2042 / 4404 Falmouth Rd (Rte. 28)
Cotuit, MA 02635
tags: water
