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ARTIST ARCHIVE
Rocky Ewo Kagoshima
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Themes: conceptual Review: Iwao Kagoshima Since he moved to New York in 1976, Iwao Kagoshima began to create surrealistic figurative paintings "swinging wildly between an obsessive and bizarre orientalized cartoon style and a bravura impressionism."(excerpted from the press release of Iwao Kagoshima's exhibition at the New Museum) When the New Museum undertook an important exhibition of Kagoshima's work in 1983, his paintings, drawings and associated objects were shown in shifting installations which effectively brought his working studio into the gallery. For the past fourteen years Kagoshima has been making intimately scaled diptychs in which an intensely colored abstract expressionist painting is juxtaposed with the graphic black and white image of "an odd mask-like figure which often resembles a carton version of an African mask but sometimes has pre-Columbian or oriental overtones, and which often incorporated a death's head motif." On the forehead of this figure a scene derived from the painterly image of the adjacent panel appears like an image of day dream. The artist eagerly insists that as both images in the two panels represent the pure expressions of the artist, the spectator should perceive them within the same context. It seems that these disparate images have much to do with the sociocultural schizophrenic split which, as the many cultural critics have indicated, expresses, to a certain degree, part of the postmodern cultural spirit. The essays and letters written by this artist in the AAAC Archives reveals that the artist has been greatly influenced by the post modern thinkers and philosophers such as Barthes and Lyotard. In his essay Notes for Three Painters, the art critic Barry Schwabsky wrote of Kagoshima's diptych painting as "One might almost say that for him they are simply two languages, or better yet two dialects of the same language, two sets of infinitely recombintaional elements that do not mix but can separately produce a limitless numbers of image variants; separately, each vocabulary is capable of saying an infinitely of things but together, these differences keep collapsing into a constant reiteration of the myth of a place without life or death." Available research materials of this artist in the AAAC Archives are 43 slides, letters exchanged between the artist and his friends which are filled with cryptic symbols, critical essays and poems written by the artist's friend Barry Schwabsky, Xeroxed copies of the photographs of the Installation view at the New Museum and Xeroxed copies of the artist's sketches and drawings. | |||||||||
