Kelli Maeshiro

As we came close from far

Blanc Gallery proudly presents “As we came close from far”, a solo exhibition by Kelli Maeshiro involving painting and installation that explore the gestures and craft between figuration and organic sculpture that connect a line from art and design to culture, place, and identity in a thoughtful representation of contemporary subjectivity. Maeshiro’s works involves distance right from the beginning. Born in Japan and grew up in Hawaii, she currently makes Manila her creative homebase while going back and forth between the Philippines and the US. Her current body of work in the show was developed during a recent winter residency at the Women’s Studio Workshop in New York, where she realized her childhood fascination of papermaking as witnessed in a factory in Japan. Here, she presents a vital link between the cities of Manila, New York, and Tokyo, connecting not just personal heritage and history, but also emotional bonds that translate crisis into beauty.

Pattern and ornament turn into aggregates of organic abstraction that Maeshiro forms into flowers. The floral shape comes from traditional wagashi molds acquired from an antique market in Tokyo, which determined the design for the succeeding paper castings. The flowers were casted from paper composed of 50/50 cotton and abaca originating from Leyte province in the Philippines, which afterwards the papers were kept as white, if not dyed in indigo. Place shaping experience, using indigo was an opportunity for the artist to learn about natural dyeing. Furthermore, to make work imbued with the color of New York during this specific season of winter and to mirror the landscape that is filled with snow; which, in essence bringing winter to Manila. The materials and the production having travelled across the world, working with time in a tangibly demanding method of materializing the ground that is to be shaped and painted subsequently. About a hundred and fifty paper flowers were thus made in a day now totaling to more than 4,000, a sign to the physicality of the process and its repetitive character giving solitude and escape. The flowers then are installed on independent pieces of fabric from a netting, cascading from top to bottom like rain from a cloud. The net is shaped as a bell, something that will embrace the viewer and as a safe space that will cover you gently. A metal structure is made to support the weight of the net and flowers, inviting viewers to go in and out of the installation.

Surrounding the installation are figurative paintings where Maeshiro paints an intimate picture of the self in between states of being. Gestures in these works are subtle, in hiding, if notobscure, inchoate, and longing for something, they are isolated. They turn their backs, the hands hide the face, or held together in place knotted and tethered. Sometimes the paint is thin enough to elude the feeling of corporeality, instead they appear thin and virtual. They are not fixed, mere snapshots in the midst of movement, half in motion, incomplete gestures. There are spaces in between to be filled. Floral patterns burst and overlap across like random clouds that float. Painterly blots occupy the space as if dense mass that aren’t really there, ready to vaporize. You can see brushstrokes shape with sparks of energy, a pattern that leaves a trace of beautiful history. They form crisp lines that curl in flight, with colors that stain like memory lingering. Pervasive too in the background is the color blue, particularly indigo. Color evokes many things: emotions, imagination. The blue could be the sky for unlimited freedom, or distance, the fathomless depths. It is also a mood that feels melancholic, alone, pensive, vulnerable, personal and intimate. It is the residue from the process and material used, the natural color of elements that is organic, growing, and expansive. Maeshiro’s works draws us in while extending itself out, an invitation to dive into the water, the sky, and even snow, which is formless and fleeting, boundless and weightless, similar to air. They blur in between states, migrating into interstitial spaces, where things go unnoticed until It’s gone, leaving a vacuum.

Kelli Maeshiro’s artwork are indirect portraits of flux and mutability in the construction of identity through place and culture, in the difference and repetition of gestures creating signification and community, in the cumulative and ornate configurations which become codes for understanding and communication. A picture will say so many things. Often, during shifts of travel and migration this moment would correspond to establishing all manners of orientation that form not only routines of self-discovery but also producing critiques of personal meaning. This naturally would stretch back to individual backgrounds encroaching upon practice and representation, producing meta-narratives of an emergent global condition of information-being, counter-identity but universal. Functioning as data-entity, this would cause automatic mutations of value, creating a home-less, face-less, incorporeal currency, not different from dream or memory – an abstract apparition that travels across space and time indeterminate of origin. Separation today may not only be about isolation but paradoxically would blend and blur into cryptograms of what authentic experiences could mean, that is if connections are made virtual, if reality is still real, or if we could relate and build relationships from afar.

I’d like to take a moment to thank all that supported me through the process of making these works, including the Women’s Studio Workshop, Chris Petrone, Ruth McKinney Burket, Erin Zona, Aurora Brush, Lorraine Cruz, Sarah-Anne Winchester, Emily Wortmann, Gabrielle Lockwood Estrin, and Sara Quinn. And of course, Jay Amante and the staff at Blanc Gallery.

About the Artist Kelli Maeshiro (b. 1989, Ishinomaki, Japan; lives and works in Manila, Philippines and Honolulu Hawaii) received her BA from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. Her works are characterized as delicate and introspective, creating an inviting atmosphere that portrays themes of longing, memory, and ennui. She is a Carson Grant Fellow, and was an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center and recently the Art-in-Education Resident at the Women’s Studio Workshop. Selected exhibitions include: National Museum of the Philippines, Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Honolulu Museum of Art, Arteryrt Space, Mono8 Gallery, Vinyl on Vinyl Gallery, West Gallery, Gedok Berlin, and Blanc Gallery.

About the Writer Arvin Flores has an MFA graduate degree from The School of the Arts, Columbia University, New York NY, and a BFA from the College of Creative Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara. He has shown at The University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Hampden Gallery, Columbia University’s LeRoy Neiman and Wallach Art Galleries, Aljira Contemporary Art Center NJ, and Southern Exposure Gallery CA.