The Garden
May 10 - June 14, 2013
Opening Reception & Performance: Friday May 10, 6-8pm
Opening Reception & Performance: Friday May 10, 6-8pm
The NARS Foundation is delighted to present The Garden, a reflection on life’s cycles and our perception of inevitable transformation. The exhibition features selections from the work of the 2013 Season I Residency Artists: Erica Bailey, David Birkin, Katya Grokhovsky, Takeshi Ikeda, Taiyo Kimura, Thessia Machado, and Yoko Shimizu. Their practices encourage possibilities for growth, re-birth and renewal, but this is not Shangri-La. The artists are keenly aware of decay, impermanence and isolation. While they reap a harvest which is abundant and vital, their work simultaneously brushes up against the edge of macabre.
Yoko Shimizu and Taiyo Kimura use materiality that evokes the organic process of growth and decomposition. At once fragile and robust, their work seemingly and literally self-replicates. Thessia Machado embraces objects which have been deemed defunct, giving them a second chance at a life with new purpose. Katya Grokhovsky’s voluptuous sculptures are seedlings of feminine corporeal performances; a relentless search for a sense of place as she plants her feet in two worlds. Erica Bailey’s architectural rendering sinks us even deeper in; conveying an ineffable consternation, she disorients our sense of perspective, asking us to engage with her environment from below the ground, looking up. David Birkin and Takeshi Ikeda play with the implications of light and color, seeking to illuminate sociopolitical moments which remained in shadow. From their pieces, brightness emanates with fury, necessitating ideological, as well as visual, reorientation and restructuring.
The Garden is immersive and non-conclusive, an exploration of permutations, revelation and surrender in relationship to our natural and self-perpetuating systems.
