Sophisticated art show explores visual contradiction

Wendy Kawabata’s “In the Land” explores the idea and experience of visual contradiction, but not in an overly or overtly theoretical way. The show features a series of ink and acrylic works on paper and a large square installation of metallic flowers mounted on pins. In this slice of Kawabata’s artistic world, what appears to be organic or natural isn’t necessarily, but she does not redirect her illusions toward something recognizable.

Her “In the Land” series is a set of four medium-size wood-framed acrylic and ink works on paper arranged in a grid, and a horizontally mounted series of smaller ones. Each is a monochromatic oval set in the middle of the paper’s white, divided into top and bottom portions that create different impressions depending on the viewing distance.

“Grow in Light” is an ambitious quilt of grays, a field of static composed of individually mounted flowers. It is a very pure visual experience, bearing the monochromatic tension of a pre-storm sky or the ocean’s surface viewed under such conditions. One cannot help but catch the hint at Monet’s lilies, but this is only fleeting as one moves in for a closer look.

At this point, I would recommend that viewers pay particular attention to which order they approach these pieces, as their experience with one will inform the other. I studied the flowers of “Grow in Light” first, discovering that they are woolen, handmade and spray-painted in a range of grays and bright metallic silver. Some paints cause the threads to clump together, pretending toward rigidity, while others retain the flexible nuances of the fabric.

Kawabata plays hardness against softness to great effect and could have stopped at the overall impression that is achieved through accumulation and layering. But it turns out that some of these flowers are 100 percent metal.

The question becomes: In this artificial habitat where all the flowers are related to metal, which “species” is supposed to be “real?”

Kawabata creates a kind of literal and conceptual gradient, from one material to another, one color to another, that operates in the smaller works as well. From farthest away, the pieces in “In the Land” look like photographs of isolated drops of mercury that are reflecting their surrounding environments. Here we see the theme of metal reasserting itself!

It turns out that this too is illusory, as closer inspection turns these “drops” into windows onto bleak but rich landscapes: gray skies over fog-blanketed hillsides, silhouetted forests with mountains in the distance, the impressionistic surface of a lake bearing the sharp glint of reflected sunlight.

In each case, Kawabata simulates the interaction of watercolors, the little tendrils of pigment interacting across boundaries in density. But if one is looking this closely, the illusion of a landscape retreats to allow for a richly textured abstraction to emerge. With one’s nose mere inches from the work, there is the opportunity to really see Kawabata’s careful negotiation of accident and mastery of the medium, and how each positively reinforces the other.

Stepping back to the middle of the room restores a sense of quiet, for there is actually very little on the walls here. The show resounds, like tapping two bells of different tones and patiently listening to the resulting interactions. It’s a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the viewer’s perceptions, starting off as one thing, turning into another upon closer inspection, and then inverting once more before becoming a clear idea.

There is a thorough back story on the wall explaining the origins of the series during a residency in Iceland, where she discovered a powerful contrast between industrial processes (aluminum smelting) and the natural landscape where she least expected it. Her didactics contribute to the show because they don’t immediately align with the visual impact of the work itself: These are not illustrations of an argument, or even a reaction.

Instead, she describes them as memories, and through her careful selection of materials, approaches and symbols (the flower may be the most appropriated natural figure in human culture) she makes it possible to re-create the spirit of what she saw.

It isn’t easy to perform this kind of inception, especially with the minimalist strategy that Kawabata employs, but she is successful.