Facing Exhibition Preparation Paralysis

Someone very interesting with a very very interesting project  visited me yesterday.

I won't name drop because he is kind of well known and working on an art piece that may take several years from his original inspiration, following research and then actual execution to take place. He needs his privacy until it is in the museum or gallery or wherever he chooses to exhibit this particular work of art.

This work will center around a single(?) katazome piece that he painstakingly researches and produces from scratch over these several years.

Wow. Was I impressed? He contacted me last year and asked to drop by for a visit and talk. He was bit of a blessing without a disguise. I've been struggling with several ideas over the past few years. They have been coming into focus lately but had not crystallized. I live by myself, (albeit with a lot of guests dropping by) in a quiet mountain village in Japan. Daily stimulation with nature but not much with the broader constructions of the world around me and my work. (You can't have everything.)

I made some relatively good work for an  exhibition with Tohei and Eros in Europe a few years ago. I was busy being the organizer/logistics man and the work I was to exhibit was second to my responsibilities there.  The work had to be good enough that I wasn't embarrassed. And not embarrassing for them. It was shown with two guys who leave puddles of talent behind when they walk.

That was the level of the bar. Pretty low. I know. Well, the work ended up being a few notches above the lowest common denominator. But my contribution to the whole exhibition could have been much much more. It needed to be lifted from the 'craft' category to something more complex. I saved face by knowing a lot about silk farming and indigo processing, tea ceremony etc... blah... blah. Old stuff for me. I am tired of it. The talks and workshops I held on those subjects saved me. The work sitting and hanging there needed all my effort to communicate the value of Japanese textiles. (Covertly, of course.) The work itself could hold it's own but only to those with a good eye. It wasn't slowing down the fast gallery walkers like Eros and Tohei's work that could stop everyone in their tracks.

I was asked a few days back on what I was planning to do for my next exhibition. I replied that I know what materials I will use. I know what colours and what the basic inspiration is. I just haven't found the groove to slide into and and rhythm to keep going and not stall part way there.

After a full day talking with my visitor yesterday I could sense a groove not far away and felt my feet sense some soft surface below, a no-fear-of-slipping ground. I felt the grass between my toes with socks still on so to speak.  (I slept deep but was exhausted this birthday (49) morning with my head still spinning with possibilities of tackling an exhibition a few years from now. (I want to have it in Italy. Somewhere far away and beautiful with food, killer coffee and stone alleys.)

My visitor is a European artist, who studied film making, print making and textiles at art university. He usually spends a year on a single short film. Using actual film, he crafts the images millisecond at a time to come up with the highest resolution images that sometimes work with intricate surfaces that somehow manifest an interference pattern of sorts. I immediately thought of models of a holographic universe, where all the information of the universe is mathematically present in a minute sliver of the actual interference structure. This image of how the universe is structured has been with me since I was a teenager. Sad to say, it has sat there in my head. When I spread the rice paste on a stencil and then intentionally slightly shift it it to get a offset shadow it comes to mind. I was blown away when my guest intimated that he would like to work around this idea with Japanese stencil dyeing.

 I smiled so much my eyebrows hurt.

He was caught by a small scrap of old Japanese material he saw in a museum on Rhode Island. It was a Katazome piece and with his past work and appreciation with the subtle complexity and shocking simplicity of interference patterns he immediately recognized the sophistication of the Japanese pattern maker / stencil cutter hundreds of years before in a place he had never visited.  While researching his trip to Japan to research all aspects of katazome he found this blog and contacted me.

Looking though a few of the well-thumbed through old books I have collected on Japanese textiles we were able to ooh and awe and pound the table in amazement when we recognized the genius of some of these old pieces pictured.  He is a fine artist and will produce a single cool untouchable piece and place it in the middle of a spotless gallery to sit in splendid isolation.

I soooo respect and envy that.

I'll aim at 12 pieces that are warmer and beg to be placed in someone's home and perhaps have good food and killer coffee eventually spilled on them.