Annette Rusin
(Oil on layered vellum paper)

NYCoo Gallery’s March exhibition is a two-person show featuring Annette Rusin who was awarded the Gallery Award in the Open Competition conducted at the end of last year, and Tomio Yoshino whose metal cast pieces sit on a pedestal in the middle of the gallery. 

The Competition last year was ardently planned, by the two gallery owners, with the intention that the gallery provides opportunities to emerging artists to show their works.  Rusin was chosen as one of the two top winners.  She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in architecture and worked under architect Robert Venturi, but her strong urge to paint brought her to New York to study at the School of Visual Art.  She traveled to Norway to see the works of Edvard Munch, and left architecture altogether to became absorbed in abstract painting receiving her MFA from Hunter College in New York in 1994.  Since then, she has shown in solo and group exhibitions, and received grants.  To be noted is her residency at MacDowell Colony.

In the NYCoo Gallery Competition, Rusin’s image painted on half-transparent vellum expresses richness of visual vocabulary and delicate sensibilities, which together create a painterly space with expressive overtones.  The technique seems to combine a number of processes including painting, monotype, carbon-like transfer.  The “Toyoko Series” which she worked on for a number of years, and the works for this show inspired by Liza Dalby’s “The Tale of Murasaki,” utilize the same technique.  The “Toyoko Series,” named after a Japanese filmmaker friend whose death triggered the series, can be described as figurative and narrative in style.  The works in this show are decidedly more abstract.  The chrysanthemum-like shape seems to reiterate a sense of illumination and at the same time displays a rich surface on the picture plane.  One must actually see the works to visually experience the complexity of the work.

Tomio Yoshino is committed to object making utilizing Japanese traditional craft techniques.  At the same time, he is faithful to his own imagery and voice.  He established the Augusta Japanese Deco with the aim of fusing Japanese traditional craft with Japanese contemporary industrial techniques to create designs and objects that would continue to be a part of contemporary and future residential space.

He says of the pieces in this show, “I create forms that depict the flow of air, flow of water, the birth of life and death and such that occur daily in nature through the filter of my sensibility.”  The works are cast iron and cast aluminum.  According to the artist, “The cast iron has a beautiful surface particular to sand casting on which black lacquer and ohaguro color is baked.  On the other hand, the surface of the cast aluminum is ground down and polished to a mirror finish.  The buffing of the fine details requires a highly skilled artisan.”

The NYCoo Gallery March Exhibition juxtaposes two different worlds of expression.  Annette Rusin’s works are very personal, and Tomio Yoshi’s expression is based on traditional processes.

Gallery writer: Hitoshi Nakazato
Translation : Sumiko Takeda