Tazuko Ichikawa — Reviews

Washington Post

October 2019 'Timber' by Mark Jenkins The stairs to Strathmore Mansion's second floor, which hosts "Timber," are dominated by a massive bear and a flock of suspended birds. Both are by Emily White and made primarily of wood scaffolding, supplemented by naturalistic details in metal. The skeletal creatures demonstrate the heights of invention in this group show, which also includes many examples of more traditional woodworking. White's work has little to do with the show's craft items, which include beautifully fashioned vessels and furniture. Other contributors hew closely to wood's customary uses, but give the material some amusing twists. Ellie Richard's brooms have handles that zig and zag into myriad nonfunctional forms. Mark Sfirri's "Rejects From the Bat Factory" is a set of five baseball bats that are impeccably made but quite useless because they're bent, notched or even knotted. Simpler but just as elegant are Richard's Foa's bowl of "fruits and nuts," a selection of balls carved from cherry, pecan and other woods, and Tazuko Ichikawa's "Fold" pieces, which pretend to give sculpted pine the pliancy of silk. None of the artists chop trees into the form of people, but two of them do carve wood into the shape of human hands. While Lorenzo Cardim's "Limp Wrist" addresses gay identity, George Lorio's "Clear Cut" considers the source of wood itself. The piece depicts a devastated grove whose fallen leaves are bark cut into the shape of hands. The appendage is an accusation: The same species that can work so respectfully in wood is also capable of reducing forests to stumps, sawdust and toilet paper. Timber Through Oct. 20 at the Mansion at Strathmore, 10701 Rockville Pike, North Bethesda.

East City Art

October 2019 'Timber at the Mansion at Strathmore' by Eric Hope [Full Article] (l)Fold 3, 2015, (r) Fold 1, 2014, Tazuko Ichikawa, Pine. Photo for East City Art by Eric Hope. "...Other artists focus less on the lifecycle of the tree and instead shift their attention to the materiality of wood in its present inert form. By focusing on shape, line and color, these artists have much in common with painters working in both abstract and minimalist traditions. Rebecca Hirsh's Camembert emphasizes the pliability of wood, using discarded, round Camembert cheese boxes in lieu of canvas to add dimensionality to her patterns of color. Lara Mann's trio of works Vert, Blue Blush and Badge contrast wood tones with bright hues of pinks, blues and greens. Tazuko Ichikawa emphasizes the malleability of wood with Fold 3 and Fold 1, both of which feature layers of pine wood folding back upon itself like thick wool felt or rubber..."

Washington Post

July 2016 'In the galleries: Ladies First' at Gallery Neptune and Brown by Mark Jenkins Ladies First Two of Carol Barsha's large florals are in Gallery Neptune & Brown's "Ladies First," and their red blooms provide much of the color in the eight-woman show. There also are vivid abstractions by Cianne Fragione, rendered with nearly as many as materials as hues. But most of the artists are more concerned with lines, whether executed with ink, pencil or bronze. Janis Goodman's intricate drawings include one with an off-center flurry of cross-hatching, suggesting a tornado or a dense thicket, and several that depict reflected light on gentle tides. The latter pictures complement detailed yet stark abstractions by Linn Meyers, each of which punctuates a similarly rippling expanse with a perfect circle. Stretched across two sheets of paper, Beverly Ress's pale "Pink Wing" seems as much a minimalist exercise as an ornithological study. (One of Barsha's nests would have fit well with this grouping.) The only sculptures are by Raya Bodnarchuk, who contributed small bronzes of standing human figures, as well as a seated, streamlined and smiling cat that is one of the array's crowd-pleasers. Yet Taz Ichikawa's drawings have a sculptural quality, whether they employ shadows and modeling to simulate 3-D qualities or, as in "Inspiration," contrast such techniques with unadorned pencil swoops. The piece illustrates the ability and the desire to expand a single stroke into a full work of art. Ladies First On view through July 16 at Gallery Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW. 202-986-1200

New Art Examiner

January 1996 Tazuko Ichikawa - Sasakawa Peace Foundation Gallery by Sarah Tanguy A sense of grace and paradox immediately impressed the viewer of Tazuko Ichikawa's show -the kind of grace that derives from humble materials being trasformed into objects of understated beauty and the touch of paradox that harks to the artist's childhood in Kamakura, Japan, the seat of Zen Buddhism. Kamakura is also known for its style of carpentry, which Ichikawa deftly adapts in her own sculpture. Using a combination of hand and power tools, the artist begins by laminating strips of wood into basic forms. She then carves the shells with an all-over pattern of shallow slices and applies stains in rich autumnal colors. Worn, but not ravaged, the resulting works reflect the struggle of their creation. Their multi-faceted surfaces possess a sensual luster that splays with reflected light like frozen ripples on a mountain stream. Unlike Ichikawa's earlier rectilinear wood studies, the works in this show feature rounded shapes. Suggesting movement and change, these organic forms provided the building blocks for the artist's personal vision and made the sculptures conduits for universal energy. Unraveling and Reaching - each large-scale variations on the circle and the undulating line - are ovious expressions of this dynamic state of becoming. Even the seemingly calm Presence, in which two pale arches delicately embrace a dark carrying case structure, hums with a hidden life force. In his essay, curator Jim Mahoney discusses the importance of paradox and the role of Japanese aesthetics in Ichikawa's constructions. Indeed, a series of contradictions - full/empty, light/dark, closed/open, still/moving - lie at their spritual core. In this regard, the highlight of the show was Unfolding, where an S-curved ladder construction emerges from a dark brown ball. The enigmatic gesture raised myriad questions as to its nature and meaning. Ichikawa's show happily points to ways other than via Postmodern critique to pay homage to native traditions and reconcile a split heritage. Her exquisitely crafted works always feel part of a greater whole. Their nuanced variations speak to the power of subtlety and the yearning for perfection. At the same time, like Prince Charming's kiss, they awaken the viewer's slumbering unconscious and reward prolonged contemplation.

Art in America

June 1988 Tazuko Ichikawa at Anton by J.W. Mahoney The newest wall-mounted constructions of Tazuko Ichikawa are esthetically inscrutable at first glance. Made of white, black or muted gray rectangles of painted wood or canvas that are stacked, joined or bound together with rope, they appear to be exercises in a retardataire Minimalism whose motives are purely formal. What is easily overlooked is the fact that in her work Ichikawa is answering to a tradition far older than Western Minimalism, namely Zen Buddhism, a doctrine that incorporates the highly variegated esthetics of silence that has been a part of Japanese culture for many centuries. In Japan, silence has never been perceived as an inactive state or a quality-poor condition. In fact, there are at least four words in Japanese that are directly related to its aesthetic characteristics, each work very loosely defined, descriptive of mood (or subjective reaction, if you want) and, most significantly, not mutually exclusive. These notions of silence find direct expression in Ichikawa's work. Kasane I consists of five rectangular canvases painted black, stacked vertically and joined with rope to an unpainted pine support. The piece is deeply imbued with wabi, the Japanese word for "poverty." Wabi also signifies the beauty of the simple and essential, the wonder available in the commonplace, the poignancy one discovers in the obvious. In Kasane I, wabi asserts itself via the humble purity of the roughly woven rope that intersects the black canvases in a taut vertical line, binding the elements into an oblique wholeness. A pale-beige vertical piece, Nagare I is made of four thin, vertical wood beamsjoined side by side and bent outward at the lower end, from behind which a single panel projects at a subtle angle. The work has a spare, melancholy air; it is an evocation of sabi, literally "loneliness," a term that also refers to the quality of beauty found in the solitary, in that which is isolated by space, circumstance or history. It further invokes both the wear of time on an object and its unalterably individual nature. Shibui, meaning "bitterness," is strongly evoked in Chigai II, in which four small, black wood rectangles are stacked below and to the left of a long horizontal white wood rectangle, the black and the white forms touching at their extreme angles. Shibui also stands for rigorous simplicity, the beauty of reduction to an absolute from which the extraneous, the overstated, the unnecessary are absent. Thus Chigai II expresses an unsparing clarity, experienced plainly. A final variant on the theme of silence is Hikari-Oto I, a work composed of adominant black wood square abutted along its right side by six gray-blue rectangular panels of gradually diminishing widths. This piece exemplifies Yugen (two words melded together that mean "hidden" and "obscure"), the notion of an unfathomed depth of meaning lying behind appearance. Hikari-oto translates from the Japanese as "the sound of light," a synesthetic conundrum that is echoed by the dualities present in the piece. Ichikawa sees her works as concretions of light and energy articulated by intuitively ordered rhythms, intervals in time and space that frame and halo units of meaning. Her constructions are not strictly symbols, then, but indications of the ineffable presence of a conscious patterning - universal stabilities emerging from a pure void.

New Art Examiner

March 1988 Is There Hope For Art In Washington? A New Yorker Checks It Out. by Dan Cameron (Excerpts) . . .The sculptor Tazuko Ichikawa, whose simple painted wood forms have a ceremonial aspect to them, is best seen in a pristine installation (not Anton's dim stairwells) - but even the non-display permitted a degree of the quiet intensity in her work to show through. . . . It's just that Brinsfield, Burns, Carter, and Ichikawa are as strong a "front flank" as one is likely to find in practically any gallery in the world - and that's a strong claim to make for a D.C. gallery that mostly shows the locals.

The Washington Post

Sat. March 19, 1988 Tazuko Ichikawa at Anton by Benjamin Forgey Tazuko Ichikawa, born and educated in Japan and a Washington resident for 17 years, began doing three-dimensional work just four years ago. It appears, though, that she was to the manner born - her recent works, at the Anton Gallery but separately displayed upstairs, show none of the hesitancy of a neophyte. To the contrary, they are splended and assured. These pieces are minimal in form and means - they comprise certain geometric solids (made of wood, usually, but sometimes covered in canvas) arranged in clusters or stacked. But by no measure are they mute. The aesthetic here is one of intervals, slight imperfections, asymmetries, improbable rightnesses. "Gakko," for instance, is a vertical cluster of four small wooden posts on a pedestal; atop the posts is set a tiny black rectangle supporting a thin, rulerlike slice of wood. There is something curiously askew here; the relative sizes and weights of the elements don't seem quite in sync. But the longer one looks - and it is the great virtue of this work to make one want to look longer - the more the elements coalesce. One begins to concentrate on subtleties such as the wood's textures and its quietly irregular edges, or the soft color rubbed into it. In the end the whole seems entirely in keeping with the parts - "Gakko" is a strangely alluring icon. Such fine, intuitive qualities adhere to practically all of the works on view.