NYAB Event - Kako Ueda "Totem: New Paper Cut Outs"

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At George Adams Gallery
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George Adams Gallery opens an exhibition of paper cut-outs by Japanese-born artist Kako Ueda. The exhibition, which features seven works created over the past three years, is Ueda’s second with the gallery and the first comprehensive presentation of her work in New York.

While the present exhibition includes several small-scale works, two works, “Eros and Thanatos” and “Totem” both from 2008, are wall-sized pieces that include elements that are suspended, collaged and entirely independent from the central form. Ueda continues to explore themes of life and death and the divide between nature and culture in her recent work, interweaving images of bodily forms with spiders, dragonflies, lizards and the like. In the latest works however, she has also introduced the human figure along with a stronger narrative element. Drawn imagery, previously relegated to the back of the work as a guide to the cut-outs, now appears on the front and in color.

For example, the central cut-out image in “Contemplation” (2008) suggests internal organs of the human body, a lung and perhaps a heart. These silhouetted forms are enhanced with colored pencil and watercolor in some areas simultaneously introducing a landscape. At the bottom of the composition, a small figure of a man in 18th century attire, including a top hat, smokes a pipe that morphs into this broader imagery.

Ueda’s works are initially hand-drawn and then hand-cut. In the small-scale cut-outs she uses a single sheet of paper. In the large-scale ones, such as the 80 x 70 inch “Eros and Thanatos,” she creates them in sections with independent, even dimensional elements. “Eros and Thanatos” includes butterflies and other insects incorporated within the central form of a skull face. These same elements also appear separate, surrounding the composition, adding an element of animation to her imagery.

[Image: Kako Ueda "Eros and Thanatos" (2007) cut black paper (site specific wall relief) 78 x 68 in.]

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