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FLAT DEPTH

GOOD VIBRATIONS: Niho Kozuru at Hess Gallery

Through January 28, 2015

by Meredith Cutler for Artscope Magazine

Article excerpt:

Niho Kozuru rides the razor’s edge between craft and sculpture in a purposeful and inquisitive way. Best known in Boston’s art circles for her otherworldly cast-rubber sculptures, she also maintains a brisk, Etsypowered business selling beeswax candles re-envisioned from the forms of found wooden architectural elements.

Born in Japan to a family of ceramic artists, the Boston-based Kozuru takes her heritage seriously and into the new millennium, casting a gaze backward to the turned and machine-worked forms of earlier centuries, and forward via material experiments with rubber and mixed-media.

Kozuru has installed a cross-section of her sculptural and wall-hung work at Pine Manor College’s Hess Gallery, on view through January 28. Located in the atrium of the Annenberg Library, the gallery is festooned with working sketches and examples from Kozuru’s new “Positive Vibration” series of poured rubber layered on panel, and peppered with a trio of old friends from Kozuru’s “Liquid Sunshine” series.

Regarding the latter: I confess, I loved these cast-rubber works when I first encountered them at the 2008 deCordova Annual. Gazing into their candy-colored, aspic interiors, I was then, as I am now, hypnotized into musings about the Jell-O Generation, investigating each component of the stacked, machined forms and pondering their mother mold origins.

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Image Caption: Niho Kozuru

WE ARE YOU INTERNATIONAL
Latino Artists in The Spotlight
Fountain Street Fine Arts
Framingham, Massachusetts
Through August 3, 2014
 
by Meredith Cutler
 
Article excerpt:
 
For those of us living in Boston’s MetroWest region, it’s a given that for the best pupusas, or to catch a Capoeira practice, a visit to Framingham is a sure bet. The town is a known enclave of Latino businesses, from hole-in-the wall taco stands to Columbian bakeries to Brazilian … everything. But “Latino,” this pan-ethnic label of a population predicted to claim the US majority by 2070, can be hard to pin down.
 
To help us access the enormity of the Latino identity and the idea of “Latini- zation” today from an art world stand- point, enter Framingham’s Fountain Street Fine Art (FSFA). This summer, FSFA hosts the New England edition of “We Are You Project International,” a traveling exhibition of 36 contempo- rary Latino artists and poets with roots in over a dozen Latin American nations. Launched in 2012 by artist Raúl Villarreal with a show at New York City’s Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba House, the We Are You initiative was envisioned as a spotlight on the contributions of U.S.-Latinos within America’s history in the context of socio-political struggles for civil rights, tolerance and freedom. It is the first comprehensive, 21st Century, coast-to-coast exhibition of its kind, as well as the first traveling exhibition hosted by FSFA.
 
Gallery co-director Marie Craig revisited how FSFA first connected with Villarreal about 18 months ago: “We were thinking about how to tap into local diversity and get our neighbors to meet each other. I researched and found this ready-made exhibition and we started to talk.”
 
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Ricardo Fonseca, An Act Of Love, digital photography manipulation, 24” x 36”.

"THE BALANCE BETWEEN: JAMES WILSON RAYEN AND CHERYL CLINTON"

Fountain Street Fine Art
59 Fountain Street
Framingham, Massachusetts
October 11 - November 4, 2012

by Meredith Cutler (for Artscope Magazine)

Article excerpt:

A grid of small, photo-‐transfer canvases in progress on the studio wall dance with botanical ghost marks, both hidden and revealed under layers of acrylic and gel medium. While preparing for her October show with venerable landscape painter James Wilson Rayen, Fountain Street Fine Art (FSFA) gallery co-director Cheryl Clinton simultaneously tends her crop of small works destined for the cooperative gallery's first annual "CSArt" this fall. Shorthand for "Community Supported Art," CSArt functions much as the “CSA” (Community Supported Agriculture) does in the farmers’ marketplace, where a limited number of advance shares are sold to raise “seed money” for a crop. At harvest time, shareholders receive equal portions; in FSFA's case, one original work each by six participating local artists.

Much like farming, CSArt requires many hours of hands-on labor for the participating artists, who have each committed 30 original, signed works to the yield. According to Clinton, the methodical process involved in tending her energetic small works balances well with the slow-cooked, heavily layered canvases she has slated for “The Balance Between,” her double billing with Rayen.

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Image: James Wilson Rayen, "Time, That Thief is Passing", oil on canvas, 48" x 48".

"REFINED TECHNIQUE: TWO GUILD OF BOSTON ARTIST MEMBERS EXHIBIT AT THE BIRTHPLACE OF JAMES MACNEILL WHISTLER"

Mary Minifie & Robert Douglas Hunter

Whistler House Museum of Art
243 Worthen Street
Lowell, Massachusetts
Through July 21, 2012

by Meredith Cutler (for Artscope Magazine)

Article excerpt:

Let your eyes taste the fruits of two artists' painstaking, life-long pursuit – the fixing of persona, landscape and object still-life on canvas through the teachings of classical realist painting. In an age of mass-market digital imaging and instant gratification, the Guild of Boston Artists steadfastly argue through virtue of their actions (and sheer collectibility) that their "old-school" model can still be relevant today.

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Image: Robert Douglas Hunter, "Arrangement with a Demijohn No. 3", oil.