Artist’s Talk this Saturday at Kentler.
Mar 03, 2016 artist talk kentler,brooklyn art talks,kentler gallery,kentler international drawing space
This Saturday, March 5th at 4pm Kentler International Drawing Space in Red Hook will be having an event. An Artist’s Talk, with two very different artists. Both K. Saito (work above) and Orlando Richards (below) currently reside in New York but are originally from different parts of the world and their bring their cultural understanding into their work. More about them below. Kentler is always free to the public, including this event. The exhibition will go until March 27th if you’d like to come another day you can on Thursday-Sunday between 12pm and 5pm.
Born in Japan in 1948, K. Saito has lived and worked in New York City since 1990. This exhibition showcases new works from WORDROACH, an ongoing series the artist began in 1999. Made up of 3-dimensional works and large-scale ink drawings on paper, WORDROACH humorously explores the vulnerability and absurdity of human life. Saito employs the image of the cockroach (the most resilient of all life forms according to popular lore) in combination with nonsensical or “foolish” text to symbolize human folly and our eventual self-destruction. To this end, the language itself is often shown transforming, disappearing or burning from one end. The artist’s implicit nihilism is delivered here somewhat disarmingly with wit and in a playfully cartoonish style.
Orlando Richards is a self-taught artist of Jamaican descent currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. In Bold Colors, curated by Charlotta Kotik, features monumental and small-scale works on paper and hand-made paper in a range of media, including oil, acrylic, pastel, watercolor and charcoal. Many of Richards’ compositions appear to show primal characters in dynamic, compressed foreground scenes. His use of overall bold colors – which the artist describes as his “language” – unifies the figures within their often chaotic surroundings, creating loose but evocative narratives. In this way Richards merges representation with abstraction to emphasize the expressive qualities of human connection, myth, memory, and storytelling.
