"Perception and Time: Masako Kamiya, Michael Lee and Susan Rogers"
2001-03-16 until 2001-04-14
Gallery at Green Street
Boston, MA, USA United States of America

The Gallery @ Green Street is pleased to present the work of Masako Kamiya, Michael Lee and Susan Rogers organized by Joseph Wardwell in his curatorial debut. This is the fourth time the gallery has given a talented young artist an opportunity to curate their first full scale exhibit. Wardwell selected these artists to exhibit together because each demonstrates a relationship towards perception and time that invites the viewer into a different world. A world that is assertive yet generous, welcoming but very different from our own. In each work, repetition and sensitivity marks off space or delineates time in a way that shows the viewer that which is familiar to him or her but presents it in a new light.

Susan Rogers, through her charted and cataloged paintings, makes visible the patterns in our life that occupy most of our time. Michael Lee builds boxes and creates paintings that trap space and light; and allow us to experience time and perception in a specific and controlled manner. Masako Kamiya invites us into her small gouache and oil paintings, showing the viewer a world that is intimate in scale but also vast and visually limitless.

In the project that Susan Rogers has been involved with for the past three years she has charted and documented various aspects of her life and transformed them into images. Activities take on certain colors or symbols; the images symbolically map her existence for the viewer. How she spends her days is recorded and shown to the viewer. Rogers sees the patterning that occurs in all our daily lives, from brushing our teeth to hanging out with our friends. She cleverly finds a way to construct images out of this daily patterning that occurs and brings it into the language of painting and drawing, creating an interesting tension between truth to the data and making a beautiful painting. The results are humorous, honest, insightful, and truly poignant.

Michael Lee's work ranges from oil on canvas, to painted wood constructions and sculptural installations. In all of his projects, Lee is acutely sensitive to the viewer's visual perception and orientation. Light is trapped, dissected and presented to the viewer. These light constructions show the viewer isolated glimpses of the transience of each and every given moment. The scale of the work parallels our body specifically referencing our heads. The effect of this scale offers us an experience that communicates immediately to our senses, the walls of his boxes acting as blinders to block other stimuli. In both his paintings and his sculptural works Lee creates a linear environment that accentuates this shifting perspectival experience.

Masako Kamiya works repetitively, accumulating a density of similarly sized dots on the surface of her paintings over time. As each dot is placed next to another a new color relationship begins. Space is also altered in each instance that a new dot is put down. These paintings build and build until an amazing amount of tension is reached between the surface, scale and implied space. The surfaces of Kamiya's work are well labored and beautiful but retain a delightful openness. The small scale allows an intimate relationship between the painting and the viewer, while at the same time the visual intensity and detail imply infinite space and time. This body of work is rich with associations and atmospheric effects, while the shimmering pointillist surfaces produce surprisingly different effects at different viewing distances.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of Massachusetts

Other Important Exhibitions in United States