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You are here: Home / Collage / Digital Collage / Mood Indigo: Under the Influence

Mood Indigo: Under the Influence

April 13, 2016 by Iskra 1 Comment

Kimono-SAAM

Last Friday I attended the opening of Mood Indigo at Seattle Asian Art Museum. It was a beautiful spring evening, the sky luminous over the park, and inside the refined Art Deco building everything shimmered in pale shafts of daylight and the flicker of blue votives. The museum’s refined and stately ambiance makes any event an occasion, although curator talks can sometimes plunge me into deep states of cultural narcolepsy. Not this time! To hear curator Pam McClusky speak is to go to Burning Man without leaving your chair. As she told the story of Indigo she took us on a riveting journey through ancient civilizations and exotic lands, weaving history, myth, poetry and metaphor into a dazzling tapestry. In this exhibit her wit and insight is evident throughout, and every caption is worth a study.

The SAAM website has a very fine tour of the exhibit, but nothing compares with standing in real time in front of fields of floating kimonos and losing yourself in the genius of pattern. My favorite was the Japanese fireman’s coat. A densely layered garment, stitched and intricately embroidered, it holds eighty pounds of water. The image of the fireman, blue and soaking, standing in a house of flames, is the stuff of dreams.

Speaking of which, last night I dreamt of the sea, which came into shore in the half-moment of turning to say hello to a friend. We looked down at our feet and could not find them in the shimmering mirror of blue green. Everything was moving very fast, and whatever we had planned for the next moment, or for our lives, would have to instantly change. I woke up to check my cell phone and read about massive world wide coral bleaching, fisheries collapse, Greenland’s vanishing lakes and well, the generally blue state of things in this tilting out of balance planet.

I never know how the world will come into my work. I absorb so much: so much worry, so much beauty, so much conflict and dread. Whenever I can I walk the lake and let it all sift out into the tangled reeds and the great bowl of the sky. Since the night at the museum I seem to have been making compositions based on kimonos, and channeling antiquities without consciously knowing it. If you are going to steal from the past, 7th century Buddhist cave art of the Silk Road is not a bad place to start. That, and the fireman’s closet.

Mood Indigo, mixed media archival print © Iskra Johnson
Mood Indigo, mixed media archival pigment print, © Iskra Johnson

I have been doing some adventurous explorations of media and surface in the studio, which you can find posted on Instagram. Drawing with my eyes closed, rediscovering the eraser, (the analog woman’s Command Z,) and getting ready for a whole new phase of making art. This new print combines the latest discoveries.

I have three botanical pieces in the Garden Show at Museo which runs through the end of the month, and am part of the Kirkland Artists Annual Exhibit. Details on both shows can be found in my newsletter here.  More soon on an exciting new gallery that is about to launch, and the SAM Gallery print show in June!

A last note from the walls of the museum, a passage from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost:

 

solnit-quote

Filed Under: Digital Collage, Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past Tagged With: art and politics, Buddhis art, heron, mood indigo, printmaking, REbecca Solnit, Seattle Asian Art Museum, water image

Comments

  1. T. Clear says

    April 15, 2016 at 6:04 am

    Your third paragraph took my breath away, Iskra, as does the print.

    I’ve been visiting a heron rookery just down the street from my house,
    in a hidden ravine on the hill above Seward Park.
    16 nests caught high in the bigleaf maples,
    a swirl of green and, well, blue.
    There’s a theme here, woven through fibers and feathers,
    the conduit being this strange phenomenon of the internet.
    And glad for it, I am.

    Cheers!

    Reply

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I am getting ready to start a new photographic-bas I am getting ready to start a new photographic-based series that I’ll be working on for the next six months. A friend here on Instagram gave me these praying hands years and years ago. They are quietly gaudy, and awful and simultaneously completely wonderful. I see them every day when I wake up in a house that I will confess is filled with devotional objects. This image is composed of two photographs, the sculpture and a street kiosk. When I walk down the streets, I cannot resist documenting kiosks, particularly when they are empty. The shredded strange paint residues and the battered metal frames are just waiting to be re-purposed as though the entire street was my personal goodwill junk department. Or you could call it a library. My cross training for the series is reading Virginia Woolfs stream of consciousness, novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s writing gives an artist permission to own their interior world. Of course, letting the exterior world in on the secret can be quite a task. That is, what studio time is for…
I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendsh I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendship, even when they are asymmetric; for the guidance of those in the temple, who have practiced for years and send us their notes and their breathing lessons; thankful for the leaf that my friend saved for me of all the leaves in her neighborhood and thankful to the man who came yesterday when my back had laid me flat to sweep and to blow, as he noted in his documentation, 95% of the leaves in my garden, into piles then compressed with military precision into small liftable bundles stacked like muffins under the eaves. Now we can look out at the spare empty spaces. Feel the freedom of silence and space between branches. Rest, as growth goes quiet and invisible in the best growing season of the year.

May your Thanksgiving be bright✨
Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Art Museum First Avenue level, 2-4! Hope to see you there for our group show celebrating 50 years(!) This piece is called Water Kimono, a reverie on the ever-changing patterns of light on water.
My Narnia My Narnia
Last night I tried to get through more than 20 min Last night I tried to get through more than 20 minutes of the Golden Bachelor. It was Pickleball-date afternoon. The Golden Bachelor, truly a lovely man to observe and listen to under normal circumstances delivered this line: “Pickleball is a regular part of my life. Any woman who is going to share my life must also share Pickleball.” 

God help us. I’ve never been able to hit a ball with a paddle or a sock or a bat or anything else. Combat sports, like music, are abstract. No matter how much I pre-visualize the zen moment, the ball somehow remains in the air unrelated to my weapon of choice. I want to see the next Golden Bachelor rewritten for painters. “He said, fingering the smear of cadmium on his eyebrow, “Painting is a very big part of my life, and any woman who marries me is going to have to live with Painting.” Will he also say “I hope she paints too?” And we’ll have a full time maid and cook? Or will he say “She must be able to bring me my pipe and my slipper at the end of the day. And take the dogs for long walks alone while I try to decide the color of the sky?”

Feel free to write the script below.
A time and memory experiment. Photography captures A time and memory experiment. Photography captures a moment in light. You put the moment away for 30 years, lose the album several times, and then it resurfaces, the old analog print in perfect form. What happens if the small print is then scanned and enlarged? And revisited as the half-forgotten? This image from Koyasan was printed small in the first run and did not look like much of anything. On 17 x 22 it is lovely, and at full size of 24 x 36 it is something else altogether. Unlike enlargements of digital photographs analog images are simply soft, without the artifacts of pixel interpolation. How curious that what was originally 4x6 looks best at least 400% larger.

Photography is such a powerful tool to explore memory and what it means to forget and remember. The idea that we must live authentically in the “Now” (or that there IS a “now” unfiltered by the past) is perplexing for a meaning seeker. I always have a memory, no matter how small and distant, crumpled in my back pocket. Perhaps like homeopathic tinctures the smaller the memory the more space it can fill.

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