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You are here: Home / Archives for Reviews of Mya Ando

Miya Ando, Piper Leigh, Butoh and Chado at ArtXchange

October 30, 2011 by Iskra Leave a Comment

“With swordmaking in Japan, you wear all white, you cleanse your soul and purify yourself. The transferral of the energy goes directly into this object. On the handle of the sword are these Buddhist prayers and Buddhist deities. The sword only has one function, and it’s a violent function, but the creating of the object is done with this reverence.”

This quote from Miya Ando carries all the strength of contradiction that made last Friday’s Butoh and poetry performance at ArtXchange riveting and unforgettable. Entering the gallery, I was drawn immediately to the main room where Ando’s paintings in cast metal hung on the walls in stately sequence. They invited what I would describe as serene shock: the body knows it is confronting hard, cold metal, and yet the eye falls into thin air, cloudspace, the sumi-black forests of Bolinas. From panel to panel the delicate atmospheric grays of photography alternated with pure abstraction to arrive at complete, resolute stillness. The surfaces had been etched, burnished, sanded, dipped in resin, mysteriously transformed by human handcraft into something beyond human. The rigor and discipline of these pieces reflect Ando’s childhood, growing up in a temple in Japan, in a family with a long tradition in the art of sword-making. 

 

MiyaAndoLandscape
(Photos courtesy Miya Ando)

Above them and throughout the gallery, shimmering kimonos drifted suspended from the ceiling. Visiting Santa Fe poet Piper Leigh creates these kimonos from pale silk and embeds words and images in the translucent fabric. For this evening she collaborated with Butoh artist Jyl Brewer (Shinjo), and two musicians to create a performance piece that traveled through the gallery and into the teahouse designed by architect Chris Ezzell.

The performance began with readings from Leigh’s new book of poetry and photographs, “my thin-skinned wandering,” just out from Tres Chicas Books. This title phrase, taken from the first poem, “A Dilemma of Transparency,” seemed particularly apt for the dance of Butoh, with its barely shielded body and the self made so vulnerable: shimmering and half-hidden, cloaked, clothed, naked without and within.  

(Photos, Piper Leigh)

The teahouse itself was a marvel, entirely constructed of recycled plastic bottles. From a distance it almost looked like what it was, but close up and illuminated the plastic became abstract, unnamable, perhaps white birch bark or alabaster.

PiperLeighInstallation
Photos © Piper Leigh

 

TeahouseSculptureArtExchangeGallery
Photos, Iskra Johnson

(Photos, Iskra Johnson)

Much of the performance took place inside this translucent curtain, and I could only catch fragments. My mind drifted. White silk reflected in the stainless steel on the walls. Metal mixed with thread, shakuhachi became piano in a temple where I slept one night in Koyasan Japan, in monsoon season. I had awakened towards midnight, disturbed by wind and strange music. I slipped into the hall and downstairs I saw, cast on a white shoji screen, the shadows of a family gathered around a piano. My mind hovered there on the temple stairs and in the rainforests of Mt. Koya. I came back to this world only in glimpses, when the kimono flew through the air and shuddered for a moment above the smoking lamp. 

Tea Ladle
Photo, Iskra Johnson

I was completely taken with the entire evening, but especially with the depth of Piper Leigh’s sure and imagistic poetry. We met up later at The Panama Cafe and talked at length. Piper is not only a writer, but a photographer and a maker of books. She creates installations that take shape as mobiles, scrolls or kimonos or cloth. As founder and principle of Comunica, she is deeply involved with interactive learning design. She describes her work as committed to inspiring a “culture of connection,” of which the evening at ArtXchange was a wonderful example.

Filed Under: Art Reviews, Uncategorized Tagged With: art and tea, ArtXchange evening of Butoh and Chado, Chris Ezzell architect, Miya Ando at ArtXchange, Piper Leigh poetry, Reviews of Mya Ando, reviews of Piper Leigh

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I’ve written a wild-mind sort of blog post in wh I’ve written a wild-mind sort of blog post in which I let the story of place, museums, witness and culture unfold as it wishes. It’s an old-style post before I had “newsletter consciousness.” (Sigh….when you send out a post with one image and a show announcement and maybe five more words and someone writes, “perfect length to view on my phone” you may be tempted to perform more of the same and forget the original muse, born long before success was judged by how well thoughts fit within 2x5” square inches. A few excerpts here and first link in bio to read the entirety. Witness and elegy is where I seem to live. Painting is acrylic ink on panel, a piece I have yet to resolve but like to see into for the next step.
If you are born on 9.11 take back this day. It’s If you are born on 9.11 take back this day. It’s still yours! Yesterday I started early and went to an island in the middle of the blue sea to be in beauty and celebrate life. As we walked the beach we met a young boy also born on 9.11. His parents had brought him to Vashon for the same reason, and he had found a perfect moon shell for his own birthday present sent from the sea. It was such a lovely moment, to remember the world is young no matter how old we are.
Taking the last golden days of summer for study. T Taking the last golden days of summer for study. The Volunteer Park museum has an exhibit showing the influence of the Edo arts in Japan on Toulouse-Lautrec and I went to see it last weekend. As you can see from these images, I seem to have no interest in Lautrec— True! But these details of woodcuts and paintings on silk fill me with a quiet rapture.
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Sunday Morning Meditation: River and woods, stone Sunday Morning Meditation: River and woods, stone and light.

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