Conversations with the artist
The writer Annie Dillard once noted, in her essay ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk,’ that ‘Önature’s silence is its one remarkÖ’ In relating to nature, we might need to retune our sensory apparatus to comprehend language and ways of knowing radically different from our own, and that spaces seemingly empty of sound are not devoid of meaning. The same can be said of the way in which artists interact with their chosen materials as they engage them in the creation of their work.
Some materials prove flexible, eager to accommodate any intention. Other materials seem to cooperate, while still others appear to insist on having their way. In Material Conversations now at the Koa Gallery on the Kapi’olani Community College campus, printmaker Barbara Okamoto and painter Debbie Young engage the linguistic metaphor as a means of exploring the development of their work, suggesting that the give-and-take of a conversation is critical to that process, noting the completed works ‘Östill whisper and echo the conversations that happened along the way.’
One of Okamoto’s primary images could be kin to Dillard’s stone. In several monoprints and drawings, the artist explores variant configurations of one or more rocks bound with twine. The most effective of these are two large monoprints, ‘Ties Don’t Bind I’ and ‘Ties Don’t Bind II.’ In the first, the image of a single large rock (convincingly created with an extensively worked etching plate) is wrapped with bright red twine. The relative scale of the weighty fragment and its tether suggest that at any moment the rock might break free of its bonds.
Using the same imagery, but on a smaller scale that is not as successful, are the series ‘Scrabble Rocks’ and ‘Incoming’ (V and VI) ‘Rock After Dark’ (I and II)–two drawings in white pencil on black-gessoed paper–are, however, compelling. Okamoto also includes ‘Written,’ an exquisite series of etchings with chine colle in several different versions, and two constructions using koa branches: a wall-mounted procession of vertical elements (’Prayer Vigil’), and a delicate arrangement of paper-wrapped, pointed twigs (’Prayer Darts: Hailing Mary’).
Where Okamoto’s work speaks in somewhat subdued tones, Debbie Young allows her paintings of acrylic on canvas to exhort in a more celebratory voice. Working with exuberant broad-brush energy, Young invests her paintings with evident traces of a process both probing and assured–no tentative gestures here. Young, working in a somewhat expanded scale, orchestrates a distinctive palette for each work, from the softer and lighter hues in works like ‘Grey Seascape’ or ‘Scapes Revealed’ to the darker and more intense coloration of ‘Midnight Muse.’ Reinvestigating the essential strategies of expressive abstraction, Young provides evocative titles to guide our search for associative meaning. Both ‘Jazz Notes’ and ‘Jazzamba’ pulse with color rhythms; several others, including ‘Tropicana’ and ‘Tropics,’ are invested with the warmth of soft air and lush growth.
The exhibition as a whole offers the pleasure of listening to the conversations each artist has with her chosen materials, and to the dialogue the artists create with each other.
Material Conversations: Barbara Okamoto and Debbie Young, at the Koa Gallery at Kapi`olani Community College through March 20. Paintings by Debbie Young also on view at the Gallery at Ward Centre through March 27.
