Kenji Hirata and Ryan McLennanat Joshua Liner Gallery, NYC

Image: Kenji Hirata Gesture Without Motion Acrylic on canvas 2009

	Joshua Liner Gallery, NYC
	October 17 - November 14 2009
	548 W 28th Street 3rd Floor

Description

Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present 'The Way Out is the Way In', an exhibition of new paintings by the New York-based Japanese artist Kenji Hirata & 'The Strain of Inheritance', an exhibition of new mixed-media works on paper by the Richmond, Virginia-based artist Ryan McLennan.


Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present The Way Out is the Way In, an exhibition of new paintings by the New York-based Japanese artist Kenji Hirata. This is Hirata’s first solo show with the gallery.

Inspired by billboards, Southeast Asian signage, and the pop-cultural legacies of Futurism and Superflat, Kenji Hirata’s unique form of hard-edged abstraction celebrates the dynamic interplay of color and form. These small-to-medium-sized, acrylic-on-canvas works explode with the artist’s vocabulary of spaceship forms, overlapping organic lozenges, and stair-step effects, all activated by Hirata’s signature color-wheel gradations of complimentary hues. Eschewing overt statements, Hirata engages in a pure, personalized form of visual play. In his exuberant experimentation with bright color, form, and the suggestion of action, the artist enacts a childlike fantasy of free movement between states of being and imagination.

In Gesture Without Motion, the central image of whirling star shapes is made dense and frenetic with a shower of tiny boomerang forms in white and a stroboscopic staccato of overlaid, repeating edges in value-graded hues. The Way Out is the Way In contains Hirata’s zippy, elegant spaceship forms that suggest a hybrid of Verne’s Nautilus and the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. Here, the central image is even more abstract and diffuse, hovering in lovely contrast to the surrounding, shimmering “cloud” gradations of white and gray.

Kenji Hirata is a member of the Barnstormers collective, a group of New York/Tokyo-based artists who create large-scale collaborative paintings, films, and performances. The group formed in 1999 after a pilgrimage to the rural town of Cameron, North Carolina, where they painted barns, tractor-trailers, shacks, and farm equipment, and return often to paint new murals. A work by Hirata is featured as the cover of the book Envisioning Diaspora (Timezone 8, 2009), which discusses the post- ’90s wave of New York-based, Asian-American art collectives, including the Barnstormers.

Born in 1968 in Nagasaki, Japan, Kenji Hirata currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Solo exhibitions of his work include: Crystallized, Contemporary Art International, Hamburg, Germany (2006); Token 0.02, Arcus Projects, Tsukuba, Japan (2005); and Indivisible x 4, Reed Space, New York, NY (2005).. Selected group exhibitions include: SITEings, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston Salem, North Carolina (2007); Ten, Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (2005); Beautiful Losers, Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (2004); Dream So Much 02, Asian American Arts Centre, New York (2003); and No Condition is Permanent, Smack Melon, Brooklyn (2001).


Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present The Strain of Inheritance, an exhibition of new mixed-media works on paper by the Richmond, Virginia-based artist Ryan McLennan. This is McLennan’s first solo show with the gallery.

McLennan employs acrylic and graphite in this suite of medium-to-large paintings, each one contributing to an austere allegory on the state of the environment. In this jaundiced view of natural “inheritance,” the environment is reduced to sparse, worn-out remnants – once-majestic trees are gnarled trunks, overtaken by vestiges of bear-shaped topiary. Animal skulls are lashed to bare branches with these spindly vines, harbingers of doom for the moose and elk that wander through the haunted tableaux.

The fact that we so readily comprehend these intensely allegorical images is evidence of how deeply we fear and identify with the plight of the environment. Like the work of Walton Ford, The Strain of Inheritance evinces the competing interests surrounding the use and conservation of natural resources. Though McLennan shares Ford’s level of intricacy and beauty, his work contains a broader range of attitudes and critiques.

Work Ethic, for example, depicts several moose lashed by topiary vines to a tree trunk, circling aimlessly. The single moose of The Storyteller, with one leg missing and an antler of scavenged bones, gazes stoically at the viewer. Similarly, the ox of The Widower appears resigned to the topiary vines creeping down its back, the telltale skull of a dead animal nearby. (The artist has cited portrait photography masters Edward Curtis and Seydou Keita as poignant influences.)

Almost theatrical in their presentation, these images resemble stage settings or photo shoots, as though the animals are playing for sympathy. This gallows humor diffuses the sanctimony of today’s conservation rhetoric. Yet beyond references to the environment, McLennan suggests that the roles and work of society are built on little more than narratives of class, myth, and taboo, which turns out to be enough.

Born in 1980, Ryan McLennan received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University. Solo exhibitions of his work include: Lottery, Walker Contemporary, Boston (2009); From Fur to Bone, Kinsey/Desforges Gallery, Los Angeles (2008); and New Works, ADA Gallery, Richmond (2007). Selected group exhibitions include: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, 31 Grand, New York (2008); Anonymous III, Flashpoint Gallery, Washington, DC (2007); and Repressed-Works on Paper, Gallery 5, Richmond, VA (2006). He is a recipient of the 2008-09 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and was featured in the 2008 Mid-Atlantic issue of New American Paintings.