calendario eventi  :: 

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16/11/2005

Two exhibitions

M.Y. Art Prospects, New York

Akikazu Iwamoto, Erika deVries

M.Y. Art Prospects presents the first New York solo exhibition of Akikazu Iwamoto whose recent works are candy-color acrylic paintings depicting a variety of hybrid figurative-geometric forms set against twilit backgrounds. The appeal of Iwamoto’s colors-on-patterns is similar to that of illustrative art and graphic design, but Iwamoto is distinguished by a uniquely personal vision that, according to the artist, revolves around his encounters with various individuals.

"All my work is about the people whom I met here and there," Iwamoto says. A habitual people-watcher since his childhood, Iwamoto memorializes friends and strangers alike. When he paints them, he thinks of their inner world. The results are far from ordinary portraits. They are a kind of psychic kingdom inhabited by innocent-looking creatures and animals without the gravitas of the real world. Tigers, elephants, limbs, heads, and torsos emerge from the artist’s impressions of the spirituality, aura, and anxieties of each person he meets. Sometimes Iwamoto’s imagery references popular self-expressions of young adults, eccentric fashion and body decorations such as tattoos, chains, piercing, etc.

This exhibition also includes Iwamoto’s works on paper. Less formal than his acrylics, these works exhibit delicate colors rendered in colored pencil and watercolor. The paper he uses, made in Nepal, lends a warm texture and the subtle colors of its natural fibers to the works. As a result, a distinctive cultural flavor is added to the artist’s otherwise borderless, contemporary aesthetics.

Akikazu Iwamoto was born in Hiroshima in 1973, and studied graphic design at Tohoku College of Arts and Design, Japan. He won a number of graphic competitions before he pursued a career as a painter. Currently based in Hiroshima, Iwamoto has been exhibiting his work in Tokyo and New York.

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M.Y. Art Prospects’ Project Room presents "preschool," featuring new digital lenticular photographs by New York-based artist, Erika deVries. In this work, deVries photographs her daydreams and day-to-day experiences.

deVries creates performances for the camera, using landscape and place as set and stage. Her images of the everyday, such as blossoming branches, folding laundry, pumping breast milks, changing skies conjure poetic stories based on her emotions. She tells her stories in order to make meaningful connections with other living beings and with places.

"I am interested in how these lenticular images - like life experiences - mostly quietly, sometimes acutely, shift between the magical and the mundane. I am drawn to the lenticular process from a fascination with the lenticular postcards my father would mail to me on his exotic travels as an airline pilot. These postcard parental memories, new experiences of childhood as parent, and the lenticular’s out-of-date don’t look at the man behind the curtain’ clunky transformation and optimistic qualities have led me to work with the process." deVriies says.

Some of deVries’s recurrent themes and interests are: hope, loss, control, narrative, everydayness and magic. Erika deVries currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. deVries completed her MFA at Art Institute of Chicago in 1997 and currently teaches at New York University, Department of Photography & Imaging. Her recent exhibitions include "Naming Tress" (solo, still-photo/video installation, 2003), "Roads and Pastimes" (group, 2004) both at Buzzer Thirty, Queens, NY, and "Watch What We Say" (Radio Free Erika internet, Internet radio forum, 2004) at Schroeder/Romeo Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. M.Y. Art Prospects presented her solo exhibition "A Little Bird Told Me" (still-photo & mixed-media installation) in 2002 at its former location.

Image: Erika deVries, Holding Summer, digital lenticular, 2005.

Opening: November 17, 6-8pm

M.Y. Art Prospects
135 West 29th Street - New York

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