WENDY KAWABATA : In the Land
Honolulu Museum of Art
October 2, 2015 to Jan 5, 2016
Reception: October 30, 5 to 6pm
In the Land features a mixed-media fiber work as well as a series of drawings related to the artist’s experience at a 2011 residency in Iceland. The exhibition presents a visual contradiction, questioning the balance of industry and nature, of manufacturing and making.
About her work the artist states:
“Grow in Light began during a residency on the Arctic Circle in Iceland. In that time I both became acclimated to, and resisted the patterns of near constant daylight and a kind of life close to the bone. I took as my starting point the endless fields of the mountain Spákonufell, the pervasive handiwork of the region, and the vulnerability of the land to aluminum smelting. I traveled to this less inhabited corner of Iceland hoping to hear more clearly amid the quiet. Quiet was found but tempered by the identification of land as a potential commodity. The incongruity between wild nature and industry in Icelandʼs highlands left me feeling spare and dislocated. As always with travel, I went looking for something and found something else. These flowers are not something else, or somewhere else. While born from a search for the wild, they have become routine and domestic. In this way, they become the insistence of interior experiences—the constant pressure of something hidden but not forgotten.
more about wendy