Reviews
| Saturday, April 17, 1999/Enterprise-Record |
A unique way to |
Ricardo L. Gil, Seiko Tachibana and David Wolf at the Berkeley Art Center ARTWEEK
April, 1999 The recent Member’s Showcase exhibition at the Berkeley Art Center brings together the work of three rather visually disparate artists, Ricardo L. Gil, Seiko Tachibana and David Wolf. Sharing the gallery space, they play off each other in unusual ways, and the more time one spends with the work, the more a certain sense of shared concerns emerges between them. In the end, the work seems surprisingly more interrelated than might be anticipated from the stylistic variation first apprehended. What begins to emerge is an interest in the subtle rhythms of life and its experiences, played out in vastly different ways by each artist. Gil explores it through a careful examination of day-to-day movements through his life. Gil is a dwarf, as is his wife, and they are raising an average-sized daughter. His images document with a frank, tender eye his perspective of the world through which he passes, and assess both its promise and difficulties. His photographs are deeply intimate, filled with the banal details of life and tempered by an engrossing self-examination as Gil, sometimes quite literally, measures himself against a larger world. Most wonderful are his recent nude self-portraits, which resemble John Coplans’s appraisals of the malleable geographies of the body and the range of its possibilities. Wolf also examines the passage of the everyday in his work exploring fragmentary moments in relationship to a continuous whole. This is particularly clear in a piece such as Sundial, for which two circular configurations of images are laid on the wall, one inside the other. The outer circle follows the passage of shadows across a surface, marking time through the movement of light. The inner images show people passing through a single space, their appearance activating an otherwise empty place. These varying image fragments play off one another in a rhythmic counterpoint, creating a kind of filmic discontinuity which stops and starts as one moves between them. This variation on a theme is picked up again in two piece entitled End/Bird Suite I and Suite II. Here, Wolf uses a series of Polaroid images of buildings, trees, street signs and sidewalks in differing sequences, as if to explore what possibilities might arise from each configuration. The pieces are like some unsolvable rebus, their components constantly rearranged in search of a meaning which can never be completely pinned down. This interest in passage and possibility is found again in Tachibana’s delicately beautiful installation Michi (Life/Road), which dominates the gallery space. A large scroll hung from the ceiling runs down the wall and onto the floor. Surrounding it are at least a dozen smaller scrolls, each floated from the ceiling and anchored by small stones alluding the road. The central scroll is marked by a grid of simple horizontal strokes, seemingly endless in their variation, that can be read as a chronicle of the implicit journey the road represents. The surrounding scrolls—whose surfaces are also gridded with lines and dots, and marked over by more forceful gestural black strokes—offer a detailed explication on a theme. Tachibana is similarly interested in the relation of the fragment to the continuous whole and how this speaks to us about our life experience, though her expressive methods are clearly different from Wolf’s. Gil, too, uses his single images to speak about the larger flow of his life. It is this common interest which resonates between these disparate bodies of work, and ultimately unifies them. |