NYAB Event - “Yin & Yang Fusing Complementary Opposites" Exhibition

“Yin & Yang Fusing Complementary Opposites" Exhibition

Viridian Artists, Inc.

This event has ended.

The opening exhibition of Viridian Artists' fall season is a group show of gallery artists’ work that embodies the fusion of Eastern and Western artistic practices. The title of the opening show -"Yin & Yang: Fusing Complimentary Opposites" - addresses the differences & influences Eastern Art principals have had on Western Art & vice-versa.

The show will open September 4th and continue through September 22nd with a reception on Thursday, September 13th, 6-8pm. On Saturday, September 22nd at 4 PM there will be an Artist' Coffee & Conversation giving gallery visitors an opportunity to talk with the artists and listen to them talk about their art and inspiration.

This mutual influence between the East & the West artistically has become even more defined since the artworld has become more globally connected and all is immediately viewable via the Internet. For this opening exhibit of the season, Viridian Artists were invited to explore this balancing of sensibilities of the East & the West in their creative process, though many already do. Virginia Smit, Barbara K Schwartz & Bernice Faegenberg have consistently shown the influences of Eastern art in their use of color, form and subject matter as well in their execution of line.

Many of Carol Brookes works are influenced by the art of the East. In the "Hive" group, the influence comes out in the fluid simplicity of line created by coiled rope and textured materials. The same can be said of Stacey Clarfield Newman whose collaged art was filled with an eastern edge, even before she spent a summer in an Indian Ashram.

Viridian has had a long relationship with Eastern artistic influence representing 4 Japanese artists and a Korean artist whose work all definitively demonstrates the influence of contemporary American art. Too, many of the gallery artists have shown in Tokyo over the years at the invitation of Onward Gallery. Tazuko Fujii creates three-dimensional collages of paper and fabric fragments embedded in resin and Oi Sawa creates cubist like imagery painted and drawn on tin. Kiyoshi Kawaguchi’s paintings show a distinct homage to Stuart Davis and that era of American realism while Korean artist/photographer Young Sam Kim creates totally 21st Century digital photomontages of urban scenes.

Some of the artists have chosen Asian influenced subject matter for their works in this exhibit. Susan Sills with her painted birch figure of a Japanese woman & child modeled “After Eizan” and Deborah Sudran with her still life of “Thistles & Bamboo” are both realists who have used eastern subject matter to express this influence. With her usual political overtones, May de Viney shows a new Madonna, this time as a Geisha. Robert Mielenhausen has incorporated the enso or unfinished circle that is the emblem of Zen Buddhism, a symbol of infinity representing enlightenment and related ideas in his mixed media painting.

Dave Dorsey, a writer & painter, shows 10 digital prints of drawings he made for an unfinished novel which become illuminated haiku that parallel the progress of the figure in the Ox-Herding Songs who seeks to tame the ox--his own nature. John Cullen’s abstractions suggest a watery landscape with Asian overtones in their pattern and line while Arthur Dworin goes a step further with “Frolicking Lorentz”, a physics term for the interplay of dynamic forces- the yin & yang of energy. Photographs Robert Smith and Darryl Moody translate their vision of reality with a hint of the influence of the East in their subject matter and their approach, yet Alan Gaynor beautifully dying flowers express the ultimate Yin and Yang, that of Life and Death.

Husband and wife, Kathleen King and Michael Miller spend their summers in Seoul teaching art. King’s work seeks a consistent balancing between abstraction and realism allowing her to creatively react to her “scientific” recordings of the natural world with internalized musings that inform the narrative content of her art. Miller’s recent solo show in Seoul of his often humorous prints whose message spoke clearly through the imagery to the Korean audience. Elizabeth Featherstone Hoff’s mixed media on wood artwork, "An Autumn Song for Toshie", was made to honor her friendship with Japanese artisan Toshie Dowd. In fact, the core of the art in this exhibition exemplifies the need for balance in the world despite our differences and what better way to show this but through our art.

Media

• Painting
• Sculpture

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