K@20 THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

KENDALL BUSTER WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY GENE DAVIS SAM GILLIAM TOM GREEN

LEDELLE MOE MICHAEL B. PLATT JANN ROSEN-QUERALT JOHN RUPPERT JIM SANBORN

JEFF SPAULDING DAN STEINHILBER RENÉE STOUT YURIKO YAMAGUCHI FEBRUARY 20 – JULY 31, 2014

THE KREEGER MUSEUM 2401 FOXHALL ROAD, NW WASHINGTON, DC 20007 www.kreegermuseum.org K@20 THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

FOREWORD

From the inception of The Kreeger Museum exhibition program in 1998, it has been my philosophy to present exhibitions that relate to the Museum. Past exhibitions ranged from one-man shows that included Philip Johnson, Tom Wesselmann, William Kentridge, Oleg Kudryashov and Washington artists Sam Gilliam, William Christenberry, Kendall Buster, Dan Steinhilber, and Gene Davis, to group shows with selections from the di Rosa Preserve collection of California Bay Area artists and the New York artist collective, Tim Rollins + K.O.S. Each of these exhibitions focused on a particular aspect of the Museum’s permanent collection, architecture or mission.

Over the last twenty years, Washington artists have played a prominent role in the Museum’s histor y— in exhibitions, public programs, educational initiatives and outreach activities. In honor of The Kreeger Museum 20th Anniversary and to acknowledge my respect for the DC art community, I asked Sarah Tanguy to curate an exhibition of Washington area artists, each of whom has exhibited at the Museum, either in a group or one-person show. These fourteen artists represent the outstanding talent and commitment prevalent in the nation’s capital.

This exhibition was made possible by the generosity of the following sponsors: Aon Huntington Block Insurance; Giselle and Ben Huberman; Frederick P. Ognibene; and Marsha Mateyka Gallery.

Judy A. Greenberg Director K@20 THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

CURATOR’S STATEMENT

In 1959, David and Carmen Kreeger began acquiring art in earnest, buying works by Renoir, Corot and Courbet during a summer vacation in Europe. Over the course of the following decades, the couple assembled an international collection of and sculptures from 19th and 20th century Western, African and Asian art which included important works from Washington, D.C.

The Kreeger residence, situated on five wooded acres, was designed by noted architect Philip Johnson for the Kreegers’ art collection and life style. The building is a modernist masterpiece that opened as a museum in 1994. Twenty years later, K@20 recognizes the Museum’s rich history. Encompassing a broad range of aesthetic approaches and media, this exhibition reflects an individual engagement with one or more aspects of the original collection and architecture. From installations, paintings, sculptures, and works on paper to video, the selection offers a fresh perspective, not only on individual practices, but also on the collective strength of Washington’s art community—and honors Carmen and David Lloyd Kreeger’s legacy and the Museum’s future.

The importance of color and abstraction is evident in the works of Gene Davis, Sam Gilliam, Tom Green, and Dan Steinhilber. The significance of nature and landscape echoes in the works of Kendall Buster, Jann Rosen-Queralt, John Ruppert, Jim Sanborn, and Yuriko Yamaguchi. The role of narrative, travel and daily life informs the works of William Christenberry, Ledelle Moe, Michael B. Platt, Jeff Spaulding, and Renée Stout. Evident throughout is an artistic passion, which coupled with intellectual curiosity, yields works that transcend particular circumstance in surprising and innovative ways.

Sarah Tanguy

Kendall Buster KENDALL BUSTER (born 1954) Bloom Sequence , 2014 digital prints, Epson K3 “My initial study in microbiology and my interest in the history of architecture archival ink on Epson have resulted in works informed by both geometric and biological morphologies Velvet Fine Art Paper overall: 6'x 10', and operate in the territory where architecture and biology might meet… each: 8.5" x 11" Designs that suggest germination, budding, merging, hybridization, or Courtesy of the artist absorption are central to my work.”

The wonder of nascent life animates Kendall Buster’s sculpture and . With consuming passion, the artist examines cellular structures, and from their revealed secrets, synthesizes her own enigmas into being. No matter the scale, her intricate constructions create an intimate experience that envelops the viewer and invites penetration, virtually in the and smaller pieces, and physically in the larger sculptures. The prints in Bloom Sequence are part of Parabiosis III , a project that explores the idea of a living city or an architectural work unfolding like a bud. Arranged in a minimalist grid, the prints are based on individual frames from a 3-D computer animated film. Like Edward Muybridge’s motion studies, they chronicle the transformation of a structure/organism from seed to full blossom. The pink printing paper lends a flesh-like quality and brings out a latent sensuality in the satiny black shapes. The related sculpture, made out of steel and shade cloth, extends the idea of a porous refuge capable of merging into the surrounding landscape. In contrast to conventional urban development through modular accumulation, Buster proposes growth through singular or shared evolution. In her model of a seed city, the ecology of physiological and architectural states cross-fertiliz e— resulting in an expanded perspective of our relation to both our K@20 natural and made environments. THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20th Anniversary Exhibition

William Christenberry WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY (born 1936) Southern Monument XXII , 1989 “Everything I want to say through my work comes out of my feelings about that steel, wood, paint, place—its positive aspects and its negative aspects. [Hale County] is one of the mixed media, and red soil poorest counties in [Alabama] but it is also a county with great lore and legend.” sculpture: 22" x 12" x 12" tray: 3" x 24.5" x 24.5" To understand William Christenberry, one must grasp the fundamental significance pedestal: of Hale County, Alabama. Though born in Tuscaloosa, a few miles north, the artist 36" x 24.5" x 24.5" travels annually to this region, a pilgrimage that inspires the natural, architectural Courtesy of and figurative references of his haunting imagery. Like a Southern Gothic novel, his HEMPHILL Fine Arts art addresses such grand themes as the passage of time and our struggle with nature, and in his Ku Klux Klan-related work, the evil that humans wreak on each other. Often his photographs juxtapose an initial view of a pristine building in a landscape with subsequent ones of it crumbling or being overcome by kudzu. His lyrical drawings, including Untitled (August 8), present a more distilled interpretation of space. Akin to the spontaneous economy of Zen Buddhist painting, their restless marks and forms are rooted in the gestural bravado of his earlier abstract expressionist work, yet bear the traces of gourds, branches, and fence lines. In contrast to the drawings’ airy atmosphere, his sculptures emphasize material presence. Southern Monument XXII , featuring a small sheet metal building, ladder, gourd, ball, and red soil, recalls the silent mystery of Giorgio de Chirico’s tableaux. Here as elsewhere, Christenberry channels nostalgia into the creation of memory, challenging both his own recollections and those we share together. K@20 THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20th Anniversary Exhibition

Gene Davis GENE DAVIS (1920–1985) untitled (P7) , 1985 acrylic on canvas “The subject of my work is color interval, the space between colors. And this is 55" x 80.75"; just as valid a subject matter as the proverbial nude or bouquet of flowers. framed: 70.75" x 97.25" The Estate of Gene Davis , Stripes are simply the device by which I define color interval.” Courtesy of Marsha Mateyka Gallery There is magic about Gene Davis’ stripe paintings. The way they pulse, the way their oscillations engage our perception in endless optical games. As the artist was wont to suggest, pick a color as a point of entry, and then pay attention to its width as it interacts with its partners. Relying on his intuitio n— Davis had no academic art training, he chose his colors randomly from a pile of acrylic tubes on the floo r—his sense of color was influenced by works of the Impressionists and . By contrast, he was deliberate in laying down lines, whether he used masking tape, pencil, or ruler. He thought carefully about intervals and achieved rhythms that unfold over time like a musical score. Harnessing the inherent properties and rich evocative power of line and color, Davis answers the old debate about their relative importance by joining them in a pure and direct fashion. In the 1982 Concord , black and red bands of varying width play off the blank canvas as they stop short of the edge and create a framing outline; whereas in an untitled 1985 painting, freely drawn, narrow bands of purple bleed into each other and barely contain a smaller painting of azure and black stripes. Throughout his career, Davis never tired of repetition, and his countless variations of the stripe, vertical for the most part, retain their impact on younger generations. K@20 THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20th Anniversary Exhibition

Sam Gilliam SAM GILLIAM (born 1933) Screen for Models III , 20 12 “You have to ask yourself what kind of artist you want to be. I had to get out acrylic on birch on a limb and then decide how I wanted to get back. You have to constantly 80"x 45" Screen for Model II , challenge yourself to find inspiration and to learn how to work. That’s the 2012 most important thing.” acrylic on birch 80"x36.5" Restless experimentation guides Sam Gilliam’s quest to meld painting and Screen for Model I , sculpture and upset the conventional framed canvas. From his drape to his 2012 hinged-panel works, he continues to innovate in the way he juxtaposes accident acrylic on birch and control, back and front, hard-edge and free-form, never losing sight of the 80"x45" Courtesy of the artist importance of the gesture and the hand. The artist tends to work on several paintings at the same time so he can find emerging relationships, as Screen for Models III , II , and I attest. From a distance, the triad appears as one syncopated composition whose flow reflects Gilliam’s stream of consciousness and ’s improvised rhythms. Closer viewing reveals complex stratification and joinery. Akin to the folded dimensions of quantum physics or an epic-scaled puzzle, the paintings take on the depth of galactic space. They draw you to wonder, “What’s behind the openings, or if I were behind, what would I see looking out?” in the artist’s words. Boldly hued passages bleed into earthy swirls as they butt up against vertical bands of divided color and stenciled overlays that resemble cracked ice. All the while, the dazzling interplay of paint application and wood grain brings the viewer back from a flight of fancy to the palpable reality of the work. K@20 THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20th Anniversary Exhibition

Tom Green TOM GREEN (1942–2012) Nowadays , 2010 acrylic on canvas “I like to make my art ambiguous to keep things open to interpretation. 66" x 78.125" The best response to a painting is to get into it as a child would—not trying Courtesy of Linda Green to interpret it but reacting to it at an emotional level.”

Guided by instinct and curiosity, Tom Green transformed what caught his eye into ideas and images that transcend the everyday and operate on an elemental level. Above all, his work is about communication. Over the course of his career, he honed an idiosyncratic lexicon of narrative symbols that play off the abstract geometry of his compositions: each glyph is unique and each stands for an individual thought. With traces of the familiar, these glyphs offer clues to a storyline for the viewer to complete. His hermetic approach to subject counters the transparent simplicity of his technique, whose air of effortlessness belies underlying problem-solving and intensive labor. Eschewing tape, Green occasionally used pencil lines to demarcate form, while remaining faithful to a one-inch brush like a musician to his preferred instrument. Nowadays brings together several compositions linked by bands of color and what looks like a door and a staircase seen in profile. Echoes of motifs explored in other works, including his trademark glyphs, a couple of symmetrical shapes, and a stone wall, this time pierced by a red window whose bars create the dollar-sign, are synthesized into something new. Typical of Green’s practice, the painting offers intense visual pleasure while fulfilling his dream of engaging the mind in open-ended play and meditation. K@20 THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20th Anniversary Exhibition

Ledelle Moe LEDELLE MOE (born 1971) Transitions/Displacements (one figure of three), “Most recently, I have been exploring notions of monumentality and the human 2011-12 form. With a process that begins with the digging and gathering of soil from concrete and steel Each large figure (2): various locales and progresses in the studio through such actions as welding, 4' x 18' x 3'; casting, modeling, and carving, I create female figures in order to open up figure with birds: narratives that speak through both image and materiality.” 3' x 10' x 3’ Courtesy of the artist Arresting in visceral beauty, the colossal figures in Ledelle Moe’s Transitions/ Displacements appear to draw inspiration from the classicism in Maillol’s luxuriant female nudes and the of Philip Johnson’s nature-inflected architecture. But unlike their sense of static permanence, Moe’s three “ladies” —as the artist calls them—are on the go. With soil from her native South Africa mixed into their concrete shells, they perform as temporary markers of their current site while claiming the memory and history of their place of origin. Their semblance of hovering just above the earth adds to the feeling of motion, despite their massive presence. They also harken to Moe’s personal life. Based on images of her grandmother, the figures memorialize her family’s transient roots like ancient funerary statues. A pack of birds, clustered atop one of the figures, further suggests the migratory patterns of living beings as well as the developmental cycle of a form multiplying and then becoming a single body again. Throughout, a sense of symbolic expectancy reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf pervades: land and human, the collective and the individual coalesce into a vision of shared belonging and identity, if only for a moment. K@20 THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20th Anniversary Exhibition

Michael B. Platt MICHAEL B. PLATT (born 1948) We Always Met at Our Water Hole , 2013 “For the past several years, my imagery has centered on ritual and the digital print on transformation of the human spirit that occurs when it confronts imagined adhesive fabric 60" x 119" or actual events and circumstances.” Courtesy of the artist and Tim Davis of Long known as a printmaker, Michael B. Platt now prefers the more expansive International Visions – designation of “image maker.” His unflinching, densely layered work focuses on The Gallery figurative studies of survival and marginalization in the context of history and the vagaries of the human condition. Synthesizing found images with his own photographs of travel, his home and models adorned with theatrical paint, he creates digitally manipulated . Ambivalent stories emerge that fulfill his inner vision. He also collaborates with his wife, poet Carol A. Beane, to produce artists’ books and broadsides. The digital print We Always Met at Our Water Hole takes the Aboriginal peoples of Australia as its focus, their love of land and their abuses suffered. The setting is a sweeping panorama where spirits and memories commingle with the living. From an outsider’s point of view, the land appears barren but for indigenous dwellers, the land is rich in river roads and desert oaks. Standing in a waterhole, a female figure signifies fecundity and highlights water as a source of life and hub for communal activities. At the center, the image of an elder from the Torres Straits Islands wears a token badge of authority given by settlers. And to his left, the face of an unknown inmate from the former Newcastle jail floats in the azure sky. Through varying perspectives, Platt draws parallels between the African-American and the Aboriginal experience of colonialism, K@20 inviting personal introspection of our collective history and its lasting impact. THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20th Anniversary Exhibition

Jann Rosen-Queralt JANN ROSEN-QUERALT (born 1951) Intermezzo Suite Part II: Sustenance , 2014 “Water, the essence of life, has been the focus of my creative practice…to Duratrans digital create awareness of our reliance on it, its forms of beauty and glory, then to photograph, held by magnets on the window mentor how we can move within it.” 52" x 45.5" Courtesy of the artist In her practice, Jann Rosen-Qu eralt seeks the poetic and the mythic latent in the science and technology affecting living eco-systems. Whether public or private, her work reflects an avid curiosity and abiding commitment to sustainable design and environmental revitalization. With water as the unifying thread, Intermezzo Suite , a triptych of quiet interventions at The Kreeger, converses with David and Carmen’s travels and collecting patterns as well as with Philip Johnson’s architecture, in particular, Johnson’s desire to bring the outdoors inside and his attention to materials and framing views. In Part I: Cleansing , soap bars from cast oysters in the Museum’s public restrooms raise the idea of sanitation, purification and ritual in the context of a common, domestic setting. A companion label explains the filter-feeding mollusks’ source in the Chesapeake Bay and their vital relationship to water detergency. Activating one window of the Museum’s interior garden, Part II: Sustenance presents a photograph of a whale shark filtering water as it feeds on plankton. Here the flora of the man-made tropical rainforest lends a natural frame while evoking the shark’s habitat. In the library, a video, titled Part III: Procession , blends footage of water-related systems, inherent in Johnson’s design, with light and color found in works from the collection into an abstract composition of its own. Appealing to both mind and heart, her installations about caregiving and regeneration pierce the confines of everyday reality and urge us to rethink our K@20 place in the world. THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20th Anniversary Exhibition

John Ruppert JOHN RUPPERT (born 1951) Cast Iron Thunder Bolts Vertical Strike , 2009 “I am interested in the relationship between natural systems and human 14 ' x 3' x 3' decision-making, and the paradoxes that lie between.” Split Column , 2009 108 " x 10" x 4.5" Wing , 2008 Inspired by the Hudson River School and Earthworks, along with his childhood 14 ' x 3' x 3' trips to Middle Eastern archeological sites, John Ruppert has examined natural phenomena using a range of materials, from sand and mud, chain-link fabric and Split Boulders , 2011-13 cast metals, to light, photography and video. Through keen observation, he cast iron and rocks harnesses the forces in both violent and quiet events including lightning and 42 " x 43" x 29 " (each), glacial flow. Resulting works brim with newly-invented wonder while retaining a 37" x 21" x 24 " (each), 35" x 41" 20" (each) sense of nature’s awesome power. No longer mere artifacts or records, his works Courtesy of the artist become instead a kind of fossil existing in the here and now. The grouping, Cast Iron Thunder Bolts , bears witness to the effects of a storm on three tree trunks. Shown without pedestals as the sculptor Constantin Brancusi pioneered, the trees stand again through the casting process. Their spindly upward gestures evoke the work of Alberto Giacometti, while their craggy edges, augmented by flashing, bear evidence of the artist’s hand. Cast Iron Split Rocks is based on a rock split into three parts by a hydraulic machine at a quarry. Playing with the notion of verisimilitude, they confound with their seeming mass and challenge the viewer to pay close attention to such telling differences as seams, cracks and material. Here as elsewhere, it is the dynamic between the work’s frozen spontaneity and the artist’s experimental practice that unleashes hidden energy. K@20 THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20th Anniversary Exhibition

Jim Sanborn JIM SANBORN (born 1945) Hydra , 2010 HD video of dry ice “My installations exploring the relationship between pure science and with Arctic ice technology use science not just as a starting point but also integrate tools soundtrack Courtesy of the artist associated with science into their design. These interpretations of the events, and more importantly, the influence of the visual context of these moments, remind us of the risks, rewards and complexities of the decision-making processes involved.”

Through extended research and observation, Jim Sanborn creates emotionally charged works of exacting detail that straddle the intersection of art and science. After studying archeology, paleontology and art history as an undergraduate, he switched to sculpture for his Master of Fine Arts degree. His initial works featuring petrified trees and lodestones, among other materials, wrestled with the invisible forces of nature. Later projects focused on man-made coded systems that played with encrypted text of his creation. In the late 1990s the artist turned his attention to landmark scientific experiments. His first endeavor was constructing a labor- intensive tableau that interpreted the 1944 Los Alamos Program. More recently, he has constructed versions of machines used in the 1939 particle accelerator at the Carnegie Institute’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. In the video Hydra , a block of CO2 itself an outgrowth of his Cloud Chamber installation about nuclear fission, appears against a black, featureless void. Resting on a barely perceptible sheet of black rubber, the solid emanates serpentine vapors made visible by two opposing beams of light. The companion audio begins with the rustling of wind then changes to sounds of moving and melting Artic ice. Harkening to its K@20 namesake—the mythological Hydra and her poisonous breath and blood, the video counters its ominous message with mesmerizing beauty and dark mystery. THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20th Anniversary Exhibition

Jeff Spaulding JEFF SPAULDING (born 1947) Virgin Territory , 2013 fabric lampshades, “I hunt in the inner city and explore flood plains for cast-off objects that contain rubber and steel a social identity but that also trigger charged psychological associations. 21"x 13"x 12" Courtesy of the artist I combine or remake objects, looking for the buried poetry to emerge.” and Curator’s Office Jeff Spaulding’s anthropomorphic sculptures upend expectations of the familiar in strange and cheeky ways. A perpetual scavenger, he transitioned from the natural landscape to the urban environment some 15 years ago, favoring toys and other domestic items. Childhood memories of building forts and making things à la Robinson Crusoe have remained constant. A sense of spontaneous generation activates his current assemblage, where the formal relation between parts and joinery are paramount to meticulous construction. In the spirit of Comte de Lautréamont’s famous edic t—“as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table ”—his reductive hybrids embrace juxtapositions and jumps in scale, oscillating between what they were and what they have become. In Virgin Territory for example, the inversion of two white lampshades, hourglass style, with a red ball wedged in between, conjures images of a boudoir, a bare mid-drift and a butt crack; whereas, in the wall-mounted Double Back , two plastic orange gaming bats, fat ends pointing upward, are arranged side by side and linked by a “u”-shaped chrome steel bicycle part. Riffing on their original connotations, Spaulding makes fragments whole again, and endows them with new life and meaning. Emotional and often subversively sexy, his works expose the lost innocence and insatiable desire of our throwaway K@20 culture with elegance and wit. THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20th Anniversary Exhibition

Dan Steinhilber DAN STEINHILBER (born 1972) Untitled, 2004-2014 latex balloons, trash can “Regarding the adulteration of ‘pure form’ I wish to leave my works open to Courtesy of the artist imperfection, complexity, free association, real life.” and G Fine Art Gallery

Dan Steinhilber presents sculptures out of the material of everyday life. The works may evolve over time, record the act of their own creation, or confront our relationship to aging while engaging a sense of potential through the experiential. Some are composed in multiples from the likes of Styrofoam peanuts and papered coat hangers; others are contraptions delivering kinetic motion transformations; and still others are room-sized environments you enter and experience. His 2012 project at The Kreeger, Marlin Underground , merged found objects and their sounds, sculptural space, and musical composition. The untitled floor installation he created for the museum’s 20th anniversary—a kind of landscape of spent latex balloons— playfully expands on scatter pieces pioneered by Process artists. The balloons are remaining artifacts from his "balloon paintings," a series of installations from the last decade. In these, the artist inflated thousands of balloons and composed them across a painter's wooden stretcher into twisting layers and bulging configurations that for all their inflated exuberance, simultaneously contracted. Steinhilber recalls the balloons creaking and shifting, and occasionally popping as the material adjusted itself and slowly deflated over time, their glossy finish turning mat and their color increasing in saturation. In the current presentation, the artist dumped out the spent balloons on the floor and orchestrated a condensed topography of riotous palette —airing out his ten-year collection of decomposing balloon installations from their storage confinement in a metal trash can he considers part of K@20 the work. Suggestive of a three-dimensional pointillist painting or a deconstructed abstraction, the piece offers an ambivalent image that turns a landscape THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20th Anniversary Exhibition of decay into a vision of renewal or a synthetic form of the transcendent.

Renée Stout RENÉE STOUT (born 1963) Reverend Zombie's , 2011 “The common thread running through bodies of my work is the continuing screen print with need for self-discovery and making sense of the human condition and the ways pigment and wax on paper mounted in which we relate to each other. These attempts have been both cathartic and to canvas empowering. At this time, my alter ego Fatima Mayfield, a fictitious herbalist/ 45" x 64" healer/seer, is a vehicle to role play in order to confront the issues of the day, Courtesy of the artist whether it’s relationships or current social and economic situations, in a way that’s open-ended, creative and humorous.”

Renée Stout operates at the crossroads, the liminal zone where fact and fiction, sacred and secular, and Africa and America intersect. Her narrative tableaux, be they sculptures, prints, or installations and, more recently, photographs and films, explore relationships and love, through frequent use of surrogates of her own invention. A central theme is Vodou. Originally brought over by slaves from West Africa, the creolized, polytheistic religion abounds in rituals and devotional objects. Another reference is the city of New Orleans, whose rich history and folklore continue to inspire her. She is especially drawn to made-for-tourists shops in the French Quarter that peddle in “so-called” Vodou charms. A prime example is Reverend Zombie’s store where she became friends with the owner. During one of her trips, the owner asked her to transform the face of a Latino dummy with African- American features, which she did, imagining herself a plastic surgeon. That figure is now part of the center display above the store entrance. The screen print Reverend Zombie’s is based on her photograph of the window front and bears the inscription, “Come On In And Shop For A Spell.” Myriad traces of figurines and text dissolve into each other K@20 forming a haze of reds and greys that parallels somewhat humorously an outsider’s fuzzy understanding of Vodou. As though casting a spell, the ghostly image attests THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20th Anniversary Exhibition to the endurance of the African-American legacy and above all, our will to believe.

Yuriko Yamaguchi YURIKO YAMAGUCHI Embrace , 2013 yellow and red “I see myself as an ‘ecophilosopher,’ someone who seeks to find the hidden hand-cast resin, connections between everything, from nature to computers. My abstract stainless wire, LED lights, and wood sculptures explore the paradox of how humans struggle with individual free will 42" x 24" x 11" in a terminally interdependent world with themes that include growth, change, Courtesy of the artist and vulnerability.”

At the core of Yuriko Yamaguchi’s sculptures is a focus on cellular structure. Rich in metaphor, they combine disparate sources to generate fantastical images that build on the power of their original material presence. Her recent experiments with LED strip lights have led to greater formal flexibility and emotional effects through warm and cool colors. Instead of preliminary drawings, Yamaguchi finds form intuitively. In Blessing and Embrace , she first made colored resin casts of seeds, coral fronds and other organic and man-made materials. Then, using stainless steel wire over a fiberglass body, she interwove enveloping, translucent webs. In both of these works, the idea of metamorphosis synthesizes above and below— pods and corals become a translucent, undulating composite resembling an amoeba or glowworm. By contrast, in E-Nest , the tenuous upward reach of an overturned tree, which the artist found in her backyard forest, culminates in new growth. A luminous egg, created by coating a balloon in animal gut, rests in a protective cradle fashioned from roots and computer cable wires and chips. Ever changing in identity, Yamaguchi’s delicate constructions suggest how the various forces underlying the human conditio n— biography, nature, time, place, and K@20 technolog y— bind us together in harmonious yet dynamic balance. THE KREEGER MUSEUM 20th Anniversary Exhibition