Takuro Kuwata “Dear Tea Bowl”
Salon 94 Freemans
This event has ended.
Salon 94 presents Dear Tea Bowl by Japanese artist, Takuro Kuwata, his second solo exhibition with the gallery. As the title suggests, the works in the show engage the viewer in the sensual manner akin to lips touching a teacup or rice bowl. Yet, Kuwata’s ceramics are earthquakes in which the glazes shatter, re-shape, melt, unravel, stick, poke and create a feeling of the artist’s geographical origins. As Jeffrey Uslip describes in his recent article in Kaleidoscope Magazine, “while not explicitly engaged with national issues of destruction, [the work] provides an aesthetic correlation to Japan’s recent natural and social disasters.”
Kuwata mixes an artificial palette of glazes with that of natural elements, presenting monumental and intimate objects. Polychromatic vessels, otherworldly mushrooming clouds, gold and silver totems and bulbous fruit like shapes people his landscapes in clay. Here, function follows form, science meets chance, and the crude and delicate coalesce.
Some of the traditional Japanese techniques and concepts that Takuro Kuwata employs and radicalizes are:
Kairagi - Thick white glaze (80% feldspar) that breaks so bare clay shows.
Ishihaze - Ishihaze or “stone explosion” is created by adding stones to the clay mix. When fired, stones puncture and burst through the clay, as if a tooth grows out of place.
Shino-yu - thick white glaze that can either drop and drool or harden and crack depending on the heat of the kiln.
Wabi Sabi - Japanese aesthetic theory, describing the acceptance of transience and imperfection.
Media
Schedule
from September 09, 2015 to October 24, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-09-09 from 18:00 to 20:00