Around the world in a day: 608 North welcomes 18 artists from 11 countries for its inaugural show [PHOTOS]
by James Whitely and Mark McDermott
Curators Emiko Wake and John Cantu flank new gallery owner Kevin Holladay outside 608 North. Photo
Seated in the heart of Cannery Row Studios, between drafty, wooden floorboards and mounted canvases of color, Emiko Wake and John Cantu discuss their newest curated exploration of art to be unveiled this weekend at the new neighboring gallery, 608 North. “Around the World in a Day” will feature the work of 18 artists from 11 countries, many who have made the South Bay their home.
The duo says the exhibition is a celebration of the diverse means of expression which call art their output.
“Difference is beautiful,” said Wake.
[scrollGallery id=265]The event will also mark the grand opening of 608 North as an art gallery. After converting the space from a furniture studio, owner Kevin Holladay asked Cantu and Wake to curate the inaugural event.
Cantu and Wake see the addition of 608 North to the little stretch near the intersection of Catalina and Francisca avenues – where Cannery Row has served as an artistic hub for three decades – as bringing increased focus to the Redondo Beach art scene.
“We hope [the event] introduces people to a whole bunch of new artists, as well as artists that were here already,” said Cantu. “We want to introduce people to the new space too. It’s a whole a new place (for art) in Redondo, not just for these artists, or us, but for Redondo.”
The roster for the event includes artists originating from as far away as Africa and Japan, as well as Iran, Germany, Ireland and the Caribbean.
“Some of [the artists] were carefully selected, and others randomly fell into our laps,” said Cantu. “I like it that way.”
Two of these last minute additions were painter Jimmy “Black” Williams – a recent transplant from New York and former fashion designer known for the cool pop art of his “Afrohead” series paintings – and Mansour Tehrani, an Iranian resident of Gardena, the delicate shades of whose paintings carry some of the care of his former craft as a Persian rug designer.
But Tehrani, who studied architecture in Germany and art in Italy and has shown his work throughout Europe, brings a fierce wit to bear in his recent series “Café Society Portraits.” The series includes everything from wickedly funny school vice principal to a precious, purse-lipped art critic and a pug-faced underdog boxer. The portraits showing at 608 North include the sly, imperiously grotesque “The Saudi Prince.”
Wake said that Tehrani’s exacting execution and exuberant playfulness are part of his varied cultural experiences.
“He is really educated in European institutes of art, and of course his composition, his brush strokes, has the influence of Western art,” Wake said. “But it’s so free. Coming from Iran, it is a freedom for him, and you can see it – he can express and speak his ideas through art. That is what we can all see through his art. That is what is beautiful about it.”
Tehrani’s work is indicative of how the show itself celebrates cultural differences yet affirms a sense of shared humanity. “It transcends the cultural differences with humor,” Wake said. “We can just smile or laugh about it.”
"Kangaroo" Masayuki Yokokawa
Others artists participating in the show, like Japanese graphic artist Masayuki Yokokawa, have worked with Cantu and Wake previously. Yokokawa was featured as part of Cannery Row’s “Wa” exhibition last September, where he presented a series of dioramas constructed entirely from food, including an aurora borealis made of radish shavings. This year, the artist has taken up felt as his medium, meticulously crafting worlds with a felting needle. In one of his dioramas, a two-foot high kangaroo cradles a waterfall-fed utopia in its pouch, whilst sitting amidst fields of green and a sky of rainbows.
These carefully rendered worlds appear computer generated, but they are most decidedly not. Yokokawa spends hundreds of hours shaping the felt and then carefully photographing the worlds he assembles.
“He’s crazy,” Wake said. “I need like three days to explain him…People think he uses computer graphics, but he never uses computer graphics. He hates it. He always makes a perfect vision in his own head and shoots it exactly as it is. Like that kangaroo, it’s about two-and-a-half feet tall, and all the rainbows and everything around it – it took him five days and five nights…He just poked, and poked, and poked, and then after he made the kangaroo he made a small world in her pocket. That is what he wanted to do, and that took another half a day. And then, for the shooting seven hours more.”
The carefulness and patience of Yokokawa are qualities that are very Japanese. But his impulse is to create art that transcends any time or place. “He really wants to create the world,” Wake said. “It is not limited to Japan. It’s a more global point of view – very Japanese, but at the same time universal.”
Another Japanese artist, painter and self-described psychic Kazu Enami, has submitted pieces from his “Dancing Candle Series”. Enami, who is seven feet tall, arrived unannounced one day earlier this year at Cannery Row and began speaking with the studio cat, Bonesy (who took the chance to convey his suggestion, through the psychic artist, that more paintings featuring his fine furry self as subject would be a good idea). Wake and Cantu were initially skeptical until they visited Japan and saw the Dancing Candle series come alive.
Artists featured this weekend who are be more familiar locally include Hungarian photographer, painter, and Hermosa Beach resident Robi Hutas, and painter Wilfred Sarr, as well as former Redondo resident Ricardo Abbott.
Cantu and Wake will both be presenting their own work as well. In his piece “DaliDali”, Cantu has superimposed a portrait of surrealist painter Salvador Dali upon itself, providing the viewer with significant cause for a headache. He says he’d like to see the piece mounted in an optometrist’s office.
“I think it’s good to make people laugh at times,” Cantu said.
For Cantu and Wake, praise of diversity in art comes from a shared distaste for art critics and artists who succumb to such critics by pigeonholing themselves and their work.
“Art is not about good or bad. As long as you think it’s okay, it’s okay,” Wake said. “It’s subjective…Art becomes art not when the critics or the people say it is. It becomes art when you ‘feel’ from it. There is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – as art, there is only ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’”
“There’s so many different people that like so many different things that there’s no way of telling what someone’s going to like. It could be a photograph of a fly and someone thinks it’s the most fantastic thing,” said Cantu.
This common view is what sparked their creative relationship when the Wake and Cantu met 3 1/2 years ago. Wake, who resided in Tokyo at the time, had already started preparations to move to Los Angeles and pick up the art career she had put aside for law school and fifteen years at the marketing conglomerate McCann Erickson. A serendipitous meeting with Cantu at a Tokyo bar provided her entry into the colored world of Cannery Row and the South Bay art scene.
“I really liked his view, his point of view, towards art,” she said.
“My skewed view,” he said.
With “Around the World in a Day”, their artistic collaboration has in a real sense come full circle. More than some superficial “East meets West” kind of theme, the show demonstrates the unexpectedness and varied beauty that results when 18 different artists from anywhere in the world are given free reign to very particularly express themselves.
“Difference is beauty,” Wake reiterated. “Do you know why the flower is beautiful? Because it is not symmetrical. Like the human face; symmetry actually looks kind of weird. I mean, right and left are different, that is why someone thinks a face is beautiful. And you want something beautiful to make your DNA stronger – that is human nature, the nature of any living kind. You want something different.”
“Around the World in a Day” begins with an opening reception from 5 to 10 p.m. Saturday and continues from 1 to 7 p.m. Sunday at 608 N. Francisca, Redondo Beach. Artists featured include Ricardo Abbott (US/Photography) Wilfred Sarr (US/Painting) Jimmy “Black” Williams (US/Graphic) John Cantu (US/Painting) Cecilia Gamet (Mexico/Photography) David Hinnebusch (Africa/Painting) Bob Mackie (Caribbean/Painting & Paper Cuts) Birgit Amadori (Germany/Painting) Jean Claude Wouters (Belgium/Photography & Installation) Robi Hutas (Hungary/Photography) Linzi Lynn (England/Painting) Gavin McGroggan (Ireland/Painting & Sculpture) Mansour Tehrani (Iran/Painting) Masayuki Yokokawa (Japan/Graphic Art) Yoji Abe (Japan/Photography) Psychic Kazu Enami (Japan/Painting) NIAMEIA (Japan/Graphic Art) Emiko Wake (Japan/Painting).