Hibiscus TV
An ongoing creative collaboration with performance artists Amy Kaps.
The Seven Winds
Kaye Freeman in Collaboration with Amy Kaps: The Anatomy of a Painting, examines the performative act of applying paint while expanding the painting plane to include the Museum’s entire East Gallery. Kaps’ role as curator quickly morphed into that of cohort, catalyst and collaborator when she asked artist Kaye Freeman to participate in creating the immersive painting installation. Together, they explore the body in relation to the process and product of painting.
The curatorial vision for The Anatomy of a Painting is to tell the story of “creation” from the artist’s point of view using Freeman’s bright color palette and intuitive brush marks. Inspired by Yves Klein’s Anthropometries, Freeman paints directly on Kaps’ nude body, using the human form as a mark-making tool. The installation is made complete with a performance by Amy Kaps in which she walks around the gallery as viewers tear pieces of artwork off her dress, gradually revealing a satin under-dress embellished with body prints, black and white photographs and gestural brush-strokes by Freeman.
The Seven Winds, Acrylic paint and oil paint on canvas,10 x 29 feet, 2019.
Turn and Face the Strange
Natasha Dennerstein’s poems are not fragile. They are often for the thick-skinned, and yet they are precious in their peculiarity and pungency.
They reconstruct our understanding of life—the mundane, exhausting,
and forever evolving history of a self as we find it at any given time, in any given place. The poems in this collection find impossible moments of hope and celebrate the nuances that are all too frequently overlooked or discarded, while reconciling with the excitation of newness. Here, the existence of each and every narrative or subject are suspended in super-hot colors, torn between oil stick and graphite as rendered by Los Angeles
artist Kaye Freeman. What began as a symbiotic overlap in content and expression became a journey all its own. The artistic sediments of Dennerstein’s and Freeman’s work permeate each other’s brains, unknowingly asking questions and finding answers. Their relationship is one of sustenance. Neither follows in the other’s footsteps but rather they dwell, intuitively, inside the spacious landscape of creativity. Through pigment and ink, they map femininity around the world.
Dennerstein’s words tell the story of the places which Freeman colors on her canvas bring to life the memories and shock of being thrown into a foreign situation. Freeman’s paintings and drawings reverberate Dennerstein’s poems in harmony, extending the experience of reading into a way of seeing. When taken together as they are here, I consider their collaborations as performance. Their artistic treatment of emotional
struggle, the give and take of instability that arises in unknown places illuminates another side of the self.
In essence, the partnership between the two is a coalescence.
Wren Miller
WOLF
The convergence of four artists linked by their experiences of Japan.
Kaps, having spent a semester in Japan as a student, Freeman growing up in Tokyo, Irie and Shibata being Japanese nationals although haling from different regions.
All now living in LA, they have synthesized their histories of Japan with their collective American experience.
They can now take their experiences and fuse them in a manner that is only possible in a place like LA.
Organic and spontaneous in their deliveries yet grounded firmly in a history of theatre, performance, film, art and literature.
This exhibition would demonstrate a mapping of LA above the known landscape and present a diversity that is ever shifting and changing like the san Andrea fault.
Showcasing the respective collaborative projects of Kaps and Freeman as Hibiscustv and Irie and Shibata as Tomotomojelly.
All the work is linked by its refferencing the fragility and fierceness of nature. Our art looks at such catastrophes as the Great Northern earthquake of Japan in 2009 as well as the impact of Covid on our humanity. We are a part of nature, the gentleness and playfulness juxtaposed with its ferocity and power. Wolf is in us all.
