Flora/Fauna – Art by Kako Ueda and Roxanne Jackson at UWM Union Art Gallery
Posted: February 13th, 2010 | Author: Sean | Filed under: Artists | Tags: animals, antennae, bad ass, badass, brutal, color, creatures, cut, death, flowers, insects, life, live vs death, milwaukee, milwaukee art venue, nature, paper cut outs, Roxanne Jackson, transformation, transitions, union art gallery, university of wisconsin milwaukee, UWM | No Comments »The gallery I work at (UAG) has a pretty badass show going on currently called Flora/Fauna. If any of you are in the Milwaukee area or are passing through, definitely check it out. I did a post on Roxanne Jackson awhile back, some of the work in that post is worth looking at. Here is what we have in the show:
Eat Your Heart Out
Becoming and Solid Gold
Untitled
Rorschach hide
Eat Your Heart Out
Stigma
White Diamond
Lyuba
Pachyderm
Forgotten
Golden
At the artist talk before the opening of the show Roxanne discussed the ideas surrounding her work. Transformation from man into creature or beast is a recurring theme as well as animal hybrids. I agree with Roxanne in that such a transformation is a fantasy, that we are already beasts, yet we often fear our animal nature in desperate attempt to feel superior. I don’t care so much for her works with wigs, but her ceramic heads and animals are fantastic. They draw on goth and horror aesthetics. Being a metal head I find much of her work exceedingly, specifically the black heads with jaws pushing out of the human mouth.
Eros & Thanatos
Eros & Thanatos
Totem
Totem
Totem
Totem
Totem
Totem
Totem
Totem
Totem
Totem
Inside Out
Dreaming of Foetus
Antennae
Gaze
Kako’s usage of paper started in a happenstance sort of way. She’s always been using paper as a drawer, but many years ago she just sort of started cutting it one night. What ensued was a series of beautifully crafted and composed artworks. A large theme in her work is life and death. Life needs death and death life. To depict this she uses imagery of plants, insects, eggs, a skull, and faces. In her work “Totem” (the red paper cut outs above) are a string of narratives composing her own totem pole of sorts. Clown imagery is drawn from her mother’s interest and collection of clown dolls. The other narratives are privately inspired and we can only conclude them in our imagination.
Current Talk