It’s probably trite by now to remind you that fans just don’t consume music the way they used to. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. We still enjoy putting on an album and ingesting it en masse, but it’s also fun to put the iTunes on shuffle and let fate decide, troll YouTube for new music videos or share play lists via Spotify. So for this year’s Top 20, we decided to mix things up a bit. Instead of just albums, we included a music video, EPs, live shows (even a comedy album snuck in there). Here’s our favorite music moments of this past year, in tweet-friendly format.
20. Jason Webley (live show)
Beatnik Studios, Sacramento
Oct. 30, 2011
When the man on stage thrusts his torso into a giant red balloon and gets the entire audience drunk enough to link arms and sway, you know it’s a good show.
19. Thee Oh Sees Carrion Crawler/The Dreamer
In The Red
Each song rocks, and it’s short and catchy enough to listen back to back, and back. They have mastered a sound, exemplified here. Loud fun.
18. Keith Lowell Jensen Cats Made of Rabbits
Apprehensive Films
Possibly the local comic’s best work to date, if this album/DVD doesn’t have you rolling on the floor, check your pulse, you might be dead.
17. Mastodon The Hunter
Reprise
Mastodon ditches spacey prog metal for gnarly bruising metal/rock hybrid and makes us wonder why they haven’t tried it sooner.
16. Mike Colossal The Psychodelic Soundsations of Mike Colossal
Glory Hole Records
From dub to dusty breaks Mike earns the name Colossal.
15. Red Fang Murder the Mountains
Relapse Records
Metal heads dose heavy riffs w/ stoner-core harmonies, crushing drums, subtly brilliant solos & bring serious balls back to rock ‘n’ roll.
14. The Generationals (live show) Sophia’s Thai Kitchen, Davis
July 16, 2011
The small porch in Davis provided the perfect environment to fall in love with every up-beat strum from The Generationals.
13. Cousin Fik Hacksaw Ben Thuggin
Sick-Wid-It Records
Hacksaw Ben Thuggin. Period. Fik is a rapper for real. From Halloween concepts, to catchy anthems, his words are precise and full of vigor.
Back in February Davis’ G Street Pub closed its doors for good, or at least that’s what everyone thought. Turns out, former head bartender Chris Armanini purchased the place and re-opened it in late October under a new name, G Street Wunderbar. The location underwent intensive remodeling, including an updated commercial kitchen, new bathrooms, a new sound system and more. Craig W. Hiatt is the chef of the Foothill Grill, which is what they’re calling the restaurant portion of the business. Hiatt features classic grill fare at Foothill Grill and traditional barbecue items like pulled pork, tri-tip, hot links, cole slaw, etc. G Street Wunderbar will still host plenty of live music like they used to, which is great news for the local music community! Their weekly breakdown looks a little something like this: Monday nights are Pub Quiz with “Geeks Who Drink” starting at 9:30 p.m.; Tuesday nights are karaoke starting at 9:30 p.m.; Wednesday nights are Funk Nights; Thursdays will see DJ Wiz spinning; Friday and Saturday nights are reserved for live music; and on Sunday nights there’s a pool tournament at 6:30 p.m. Upcoming noteworthy shows include Shayna and the Bulldog on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2011 and The Brodys and A Single Second on Friday, Dec. 9, 2011. For more information, find G Street Wunderbar on Facebook or follow them on Twitter, @GStWunderBar.
Artist Chico MacMurtrie Brings Inflatable Robot Technology to Davis
Rambling somewhere around the axis of where sculpture, engineering, robotics and puppetry collide lays the malleable artworks of Brooklyn-based visionary Chico MacMurtrie. For the past 20 years, MacMurtrie’s anthropomorphic mechanisms have taken on many forms, stimulating commentary on the meaning of movement, of life and of the ways in which viewers are allowed to interact with art, while at the same time examining how art interacts with the world at large.
For reference, take MacMurtrie’s large-scale installation, Birds–showing at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery at the UC Davis campus through Dec. 11, 2011Birds brings together a fleet of elegant bird-like creations, hung in a procession above snaking floor lights meant to represent a river. The installation utilizes some complicated mechanics, computers, a revolutionary inflatable architecture technology created by MacMurtrie himself, and very subtle robotics to produce an interactive demonstration. The inflatable technology, made of a light fabric, essentially allows the avian forms, though loaded with mechanical actuators and machines for movement, to approximate seamless, non-rigid organisms. The “bird” sculptures react to environmental sensors–triggered by the people in the room–by coming to life from a deflated form, to begin beating their wing-like appendages as if flying. Portraying qualities consistent with actual living systems, should a viewer get too close to the sculptures, or spend too much time ogling, they begin to devolve, or die, eventually crumbling back into their stasis one by one.
In short, it’s a provocative commentary on environmentalism, over-population, urban sprawl and more…with robots!
To give an accurate synopsis of MacMurtrie’s robotic sculpture work is nearly impossible, given that the more tangible elements of contemporary art remain satisfyingly absent in his work. Instead, MacMurtrie’s muse is derived from the examination of amorphic shape shifting, using robotics to bring to life geometrically abstract creations–most of them very big–to titillate viewers, and to bring a sense of symbiosis to the art-viewing ritual.
MacMurtrie’s sense of reinvention began during his undergrad college days at the University of Arizona. As a painter, MacMurtrie, 50, says he felt confined by the starkness of the canvas.
“My paintings got more physical, and ultimately I began literally throwing my body into my paintings, using my body as a brush,” explains MacMurtrie. “Ultimately, what I was after was the resulting effect of the paint on my body.”
When the paint had dried on him, the result left a kind of skin. MacMurtrie had an epiphany to move away from painting toward creating transformational performance pieces utilizing body skins. It wasn’t until he took the skins off that the seeds of what MacMurtrie now grows would be sown.
Inner Space - Photo: Chico MacMurtrie / ARW
“Once I emerged out of the skins, I noticed that the skins had a life of their own that was even more interesting and more powerful, in my opinion,” says MacMurtrie. “I began to figure out how to put sub-structures into these skins to animate them.”
MacMurtrie taught himself robotics, and began to see the world in mechanical systems. His new muse was to break down movements mechanically, while utilizing his background in sculpture to form a hybrid of the two. This process began with MacMurtrie’s creation of interactive robotic humanoids in the early ‘90s, collaborating with computer engineers and programmers, and has moved into his innovative work with inflatable robotic architecture. In order for him to progress, MacMurtrie literally had to reinvent the way the processes of construction and implementation were approached for his work–to move beyond robotic automation, and into abstract robotic sculpture.
Simply put, he’s not an engineer. But that doesn’t bother him.
“If I would have gone to engineering school, it would have inhibited [me],” says MacMurtrie. “Often, I’m doing things that are extremely difficult and challenging. People who have a practical understanding of engineering wouldn’t take those things on. I end up creating more work for myself because I’m not an engineer, but it’s more of a genuine process, I think.”
With lots of funding help, due in no small part to five grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as funding from national, local and international granting agencies and 30 corporate sponsors, MacMurtrie and his collaborative group of artists, technicians and programmers–Amorphic Robot Works, founded in 1991–have created more than 250 mechanical sculptures that assume anthropomorphic and abstract forms that have been shown all over the world.
Totemobile - Photo: Chico MacMurtrie / ARW
Totemobile - Photo: Chico MacMurtrie / ARW
Totemobile - Photo: Chico MacMurtrie / ARW
Big examples of this work include Totemobile–a robotic sculpture that in its settled form appears as a life-sized representation of a 1965 Citroën DS automobile. During the performance process, the sculpture is disassembled robotically, growing slowly from the inside out to finally bloom into an organic 60-foot-tall totem pole. The result–which utilizes the inflatable technology–is a stunning pseudo-Transformers study of pop culture idolization and the inner-workings of organic labor that any construct of man was forced to endure.
With Birds, MacMurtrie tried to create an in-between point from Totemobile, and his early humanoid robots.
“[The birds] could be legs, they could be cones. They are certainly abstractions of birds,” explains MacMurtrie. “People see them as birds because they appear to have wings, and they appear to live and die, and they appear to take flight. They also have a pattern of becoming unified, then falling out of order. It resembles nature. It’s not so important that they are literally birds to me, as much as [viewers] get a sense of: they’re organizing the way nature organizes. They fall apart the same way that nature tends to fall apart.”
MacMurtrie says that the birds have received different reactions the world over. And while the abstractness of his work is true in a geometric sense, his hope is that it inspires people to think beyond the mechanics of his creations.
“The most important thing is that it’s alive, it has a life force, it’s trying to organize itself and trying to find its structure,” says MacMurtrie. “There’s a lot of social commentary [in Birds], but it’s extremely subtle. The birds work pretty much the same way we do. The difference is they’re fueled by air, and if we can’t breathe, we don’t live, and if we don’t eat fuel, we certainly don’t live. In this case, their air is fueled by electricity. It’s similar or parallel to our living.”
Birds shows at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery at Nelson Hall at UC Davis through December 11, 2011. Gallery hours are Monday through Thursday, Saturday and Sunday 11:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m. and by appointment Fridays. Call (530) 752-8500 for more information. For more about Chico MacMurtrie, visit Amorphicrobotworks.org.
On Friday, Nov. 4, Mondavi Center in Davis will host Mystery Science Theatre 3000 live on stage. Cinematic Titanic is a movie-riffing show that features the original creators of the Peabody Award-winning cult-classic series MST3K, continuing the tradition of riffing “the unfathomable,” “the horribly great” and the just plain “cheesy” movies from the past. The crew will riff away on the 1972 film Doomsday Machine, a movie that is sure to be much more fun to watch with Cinematic Titantic’s twists. Show starts at 8 p.m. and tickets are available online at Mondaviarts.org
Dave’s Pumpkin Patch in West Sacramento is just minutes from downtown Sacramento and is the only full-sized themed corn maze in the area. Grab some pumpkins to take home and carve and stay past sundown and venture into the corn maze. Every Friday and Saturday night in October, Fright Night will even “haunt” the maze with some of their actors all dressed up in character, as if getting lost in a giant corn maze when it’s pitch black isn’t freaky enough. Don’t forget your flashlights (unless you are really hardcore). Also notable: on weekends they do their “Punkin’ Chunkin” every so often where they cannon pumpkins over 500 yards through the air! Take an old-fashioned hay ride, get your little ones’ faces painted, watch pig races and more. Dave’s Pumpkin Patch is located at 3010 Burrows Avenue, West Sacramento and can be reached at (916) 849-9450 or online via Davespumpkinpatch.com
Garrett Pierce taps the healing powers of lyrics on his new EP
Envision sitting on a boat along a murky jungle river in a downpour of a storm in Guatemala, watching the river boat captain try to navigate the boat, except for the fact that he is lost.
This wouldn’t seem like a time for laughter.
But for semi-local songwriter Garrett Pierce, the moment could not have been more perfect.
“I just started laughing. It’s one of those epiphany moments where things that were built up from my time in San Francisco were just kind of built up and went down that water,” he remembers.
These are the heavy emotions that often play out in Pierce’s songs.
This October, Pierce is releasing a four-song collection on the EP Everybody Breaks under Narnack Records, which will be followed by his full-length City of Sands, which is set for release in January or February 2012.
Everybody Breaks is both melancholic and uplifting. At times it feels like reading a diary in the gray of winter. “In Silence” is sung over the sound of a warped organ, while “Shape Us Like Waves” is a rich composition in which Pierce sings, “We are people of the coast, so we know that the waves can break if we make it so,” in a dreary ode to the Bay.
What has been a constant is Pierce’s passion for writing. His musical beginnings were fostered in Southern California, starting when his dad bought him his first acoustic guitar around age 12.
“The first thing I did was write, which was very strange. He wanted me to take lessons and learn blues guitar, but I had no interest in shredding, I guess. I just wanted to write,” he said. “It hasn’t really changed since then.”
Growing up in what is considered either the armpit or artistic mecca of California, depending upon your outlook, Pierce has immersed himself into music from a young age.
First he went through a grunge phase that morphed into a hard rock phase by the time he joined a rock band in high school.
Pierce remembers when he first dabbled with writing acoustic-based songs after moving back to Los Angeles.
“Everybody was trying to be Jewel or John Mayer or something on the acoustic guitar, and it was a terrible time for me because I had all these songs. I just didn’t feel like I had an audience yet,” he said.
It was during this time that a friend invited Pierce to move to Davis to start playing music.
He laughed at the question and asked, “Why on Earth would I move from L.A. to Davis?”
As it turned out, he said it ended up being the best move of his life. He established his roots as a songwriter and connected with the likes of Davis experimental indie band Sholi as well as Michael Leahy, a KDVS host and founder of Crossbill Records, which would eventually put out Pierce’s first two albums, Like a Moth and All Masks.
“L.A. was not the place for me, there was just all these people trying to cut you record contracts down there,” he said.
Davis provided something that L.A. didn’t. There was a tight-knit musical community and he could play his songs where people would listen to him as a songwriter. And it was at this time that other lyrically creative, acoustic-based performers like Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart began to garner attention in the music world.
“That was just a totally great time to be playing music,” he said.
Nowadays, Pierce finds himself again adjusting to new territory, this time in Sonoma.
When Submerge caught up with Pierce over the phone, he had just gone for a five-mile run through the oaks and pines.
It sounds like you’re an advocate of having strong lyrical content.
Oh yeah, that’s the biggest thing for me. It doesn’t mean I don’t listen to music that doesn’t have lyrics. Thirty Three is one of my favorite bands, and they don’t have a singer. For me, it’s really important that people who are interested in my music think of it first as a lyrically based form, that writers are my biggest influences, taking from people like Steinbeck and Richard Wright, they are my biggest influences… Lyrics are huge, and shaping the right mood of the song around the lyrics is the most important thing.
Everybody Breaks struck a chord with me, both the EP as well as the song. You said some of these songs are older, but I was interested in knowing what you were feeling at the time you wrote “Everybody Breaks.”
That’s a tough one. I was talking to Nathan, our publicist, and just describing the songs to him, and I realized that the EP sounds pretty and it sounds uplifting even at times, but the lyrical content is on the darker side. I was thinking of long-term relationships and thinking about the body breaking down and all these dark feelings started coming together into one mass. I was listening to a lot of John Jacob Niles, an old soul folk singer, and my buddy who is Ellie Fortune, they both have this really nice, rootsy, folk guitar playing style. So I based the vibe of the song around this sparse guitar picking, and then the lyrics were just trying to lift me out of a funk of just thinking about the end of things.
And what about “A Bus in Africa?”
I was listening to NPR, and I heard this horrendous story, about–I think it took place in Uganda, if I’m correct–about this group of people in a bus who got pulled to the side by child soldiers, and pulled out of the bus and taken out at gunpoint, and people were put underneath the bus, and the bus driver was [forced] to get back in and run over the people, over and over. It was the most disturbing thing I had heard all year, and I couldn’t get it out my head, the image was terrifying to me.
For me, it’s harder to talk about those things sometimes. You don’t just want to bring it up in a conversation like that with your friends. So I take myself to a place where I can find out what was really happening in the minds of some of those people on the bus. It’s a first-person account, for some reason it’s the only way I could think to write it, and the chorus, like a lot of my songs, it’s not purely dark. The chorus has this amazing, positive chant, “That’s what love is for.” And it sounds very strange in juxtaposition to the lyrics that talk about these bandits that are killing everybody. But this person [has] this mantra of love for his family and why you need to have love so you don’t turn into these monsters that were taking the lives of people around them.
You were in an experimental noise band, 60 Watt Kid…
[Laughs] You have done some pretty good research. Where did you get that information from?
It’s amazing the things you find online. It looks like you were the drummer, and I listened to it, and I thought, “Man, what prompted this drastic change from you being in an experimental noise band to being a folk singer/songwriter?”
Well, actually those were concurrent. I was still playing plenty of solo stuff, but my whole goal when I moved to San Francisco was to be able to play my own music and kind of make a living from it… I just ran into them randomly at a bar in Oakland, and they said they were looking to hang out with new people and play music. He and this guy Derek had started this band 60 Watt Kid, and I invited them to play a couple shows with me. They were looking for a drummer, and I said, “Hey, I think I know how to play drums. And I’ll play with you guys until you find somebody.” And we just ended up clicking really well. The songs actually started more acoustic-based. We were like a lot of people at the time, we were listening to a lot of Animal Collective and it definitely showed in some of the earlier recordings. And then it just kind of got crazy… We would play characters on stage too, and dress up in sparkly weirdness. And I would kind of go caveman crazy on the drums. I was playing all four toms and a cymbal, and a tambourine around my ankle. It was not very complicated drumming, it was that caveman tribal stuff. It was so good to be physical, and we would break stuff and yell at each other’s faces. It was more Andy Kaufman, honestly. It was wild and it was so much better than standing with an acoustic guitar for me, for a little bit. It was a performance aspect I had missed since I was in rock bands in high school.
Garrett Pierce’s Everybody Breaks is out now on Narnack Records. He’ll celebrate the release in Sacramento on Oct. 21, 2011 at Bows & Arrows. Look for his new full-length album early next year.
Ground Zero Clothing and Boardshop has a couple events coming up worth noting for all you board sport junkies out there. On Friday, Oct. 14, they’ll host a snowboard movie premiere at Ace of Spades (1417 R Street), where you can peep the new flick from Finger on Da Trigger and Marc Frank Montoya Productions, Familia 2, the trailer for which has some of the heaviest street riding I’ve ever seen. Also screening will be Shoot the Moon from Videograss. Riders from the films will be in attendance for meet and greets and signings, and there will be thousands of dollars’ worth of free swag given out to the crowd, not to mention a free lift ticket to Sierra-at-Tahoe with paid admission, which is only $14 in advance (at all Ground Zero locations) or $16 the day of or at the door. Tickets are also available through Aceofspadessac.com. Doors open at 6 p.m., show starts at 7 p.m., all ages are welcome and there are three bars within the venue for the 21-and-over crowd. Then just two days later on Sunday, Oct. 16, Ground Zero will present their 14th annual Fallout Fest skateboard contest in the streets of downtown Davis. The Ground Zero-provided street course, which will be set up on 3rd Street between F and G streets (near their shop), will be the setting for this epic competition. There are two divisions (under 16 and 16-and-over), each with two categories (beginner and intermediate). Only 15 skaters per category, so if you’re thinking about entering, do so fast. The event is free to watch and there will be free gear given out to the crowd, so head on out to Davis from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. and watch some local rippers compete for gear and a $900 cash purse! For more information about the contest or to learn how to enter, visit Groundzeroboardshop.net or call their Davis location at (530) 753-7775.
Wednesday May 25, 2011
Sophia’s Thai Kitchen, Davis
The only barrier that separated the musicians from the audience members at Sophia’s Thai Kitchen in Davis was a white string of lights. The only items that separated the musicians that made up headliner S. Carey were their own instruments, due to the lack of space on the cozy porch stage. The man playing on the porch that night was Sean Carey, best known as the drummer and vocalist from Bon Iver, who made the wooden panels of the porch move Wednesday night.
The show began with an opening set played by Tor House, aka Daryl Jason Lazaro, who stood and sang in front of the other band’s instruments that were piled on the porch. His set only involved him, his guitar, and a few of his number-one fans and friends in the crowd who demanded an encore.
Shortly after Tor House was finished with his encore, Other Lives warmed up for their set. Originally from Oklahoma, the folksy sounding band admitted they were kind of making things up as they went along. Even if they were improvising, they played their soothing acoustic set with ease and seemed to love every minute of it. But during the middle of their set, a group of people near the bar started to have loud conversations that could be heard over the music. At one point the lead singer was strumming his guitar and mildly glaring at the people who were making obnoxious bar noise and said to the quiet people in the front, “Thank you very much for being polite.” Despite the ruckus, Other Lives finished their set to make way for the sounds of S. Carey.
Other Lives
Sean Carey and his band were playing so close together on the small porch that they could have all joined hands while performing if they wanted to. Carey even said that he was glad to play at such a “unique venue.” They started off their set with a low, ambient hum of the combination of the piano, xylophone, bass, drums and guitar, then gradually moved into their songs. S. Carey is the type of band that would be great to have every night in your living room before bedtime to provide sweet lullabies for a good night’s rest. It was mesmerizing to watch the xylophone player balance the four mallets between his fingers as he would hit the different notes on the giant bars. Sean Carey made sure to thank everyone almost after every song and at one point moved his talent from the back of his piano to the front of a drum. Intimacy is hard to achieve at most outdoor shows because the acoustics can get lost in the fresh air. But Carey and his band made each audience member feel as if they were given a one-on-one session with the music. That night’s intimacy was felt in the audience members keeping warm with the surrounding body heat on a chilly night; the dark red glow on each performer’s face that was provided by the only “stage lights” for the show; the street light turning on in the middle of the set, providing S. Carey a little more stage light for their performance; the crowd of 30 feeling the porch pulsate beneath them while they held Chimay glasses and beer bottles at their side.
Anyone can listen to the music of S. Carey on an iPod, in a video on YouTube, or in the car, but nothing can beat feeling the music on a small porch in Davis.
I’d exercise caution when saying to your friends, “Get your Fat Face on!” They might take it the wrong way. Preface it by letting them know that it’s actually a good thing and you’re not attacking their winter waistline. Fat Face is the name of Jaymes Luu’s sandwich and gourmet popsicle business that has recently closed shop in Davis and will now be take residence in the new Bows and Arrows space (1815 19th Street, Sacramento). Luu describes the name of the business as a funny term for enjoying really good food, but in very humble way. It’s a term that she and her friends came up with that’s a very fitting definition, considering that Luu’s food is both good and humble.
On the Fat Face website, Luu encourages customers trying her popsicles to be “adventurous” and to “challenge their palates.” This might seem like a disclaimer for the out-there kind of flavors, but who wrote the rules on what a popsicle should be, anyway? Luu has been pushing the boundaries with her frozen confections, and the boundaries have never tasted so good. Among some of her more popular flavors is the Kaffir limeade and avocado, an interesting concoction for the title of “most popular.” Apparently fans of Fat Face have taken the challenge.
Fat Face’s previous location was on L Street in Davis, a small space where she not only served her signature popsicles, but also cranked out delicious sandwiches to boot. Grilled cheese with beer poached figs, smoked salmon, cola braised pork sandwiches or asparagus-filled breakfast “sammies” are some of the fun and sometimes wonky menu items that can be found at Fat Face. Ingredients are seasonal and specials can change on a whim, depending on who Luu has heard a suggestion from that day.
“[I get suggestions from] a lot of people I work with or customers will come up and be like, hey I think you should make this-and-this popsicle,” says Luu. “That will spark me to make new flavors.”
Luu is currently working on a mango and sticky rice popsicle and one of her newest flavors is something she calls the “bacon and egg.” Luu describes it as a “very yolky vanilla custard with a ginger bacon caramel.”
At the new location, Luu plans to extend her menu by playing off of the beer and wine list that Bows and Arrows owners Trisha Rhomberg and Olivia Coelho have been piecing together. The potential for crafting some small plates has sparked an interest for Luu, and she’s already got some ideas in mind.
“I want to have a pickle plate, fun popcorn; I’m trying to have more fun bar food like olives, but figure out how to make that more interesting than just olives,” says Luu.
When Luu decided to collaborate with Rhomberg and Coelho, she was drawn to their commitment to the project and how serious they were about making it all come together. They already had a building locked down, a kitchen in place and agreed to take on the build out. If all that wasn’t appealing enough, Luu also just simply liked what the whole thing was about.
“I appreciate their vision for what they want to do and what they want to bring; a community they want to create with their art stuff and their music,” says Luu.
The feeling was mutual.
“We went to eat lunch at Fat Face in Davis…walked in and loved everything about it. Super simple, sophisticated food that was local, seasonal, farm to table, scrumptious ingredients–really interesting flavors mixed together. The presentation was really humble but it was really good food,” says Coelho.
There’s something about Fat Face that Sacramento just hasn’t seen yet. It’s hard to put a label on and difficult to pigeonhole or compare with another cuisine. With the amount of support that was shown by Sacramento at the first annual Mobile Food Truck Festival, it’s clear that we love walking up to a truck to get something tasty. And wasn’t that idea born from the jingle of the neighborhood ice cream truck or paletero cart? Luu herself was at that festival, conducting a sort of Sacramento dry run, and her line was as long as the rest. Looks like we’re in for a fun summer. Now go get your Fat Face on.
May Izumi brings her fantastical sculptures to Davis
I take great pleasure in escaping to a fantasy world that I have created in the dark chasms of my mind. Many different forms of media fuel my strange utopia: literature, film, music and in the case of May Izumi—sculptures. A Honolulu, Hawaii, native, Izumi’s sculptures depict otherworldly creatures and figures that peer out from pensive eyes and stand with alluring postures that dare you to come in and look closer. Turns out, Izumi is a lot like me—searching the depths of her mind and referencing the words and illustrations of childhood stories and fairytales to create a world of animal hybrids.
Unlike an illustrator of an intricately woven fantasy, Izumi’s preparation doesn’t begin in a sketchbook with a set of colored pencils and an eraser. She prefers longhand.
“I’m an editor, so I actually write stuff out first. Sometimes it’s just words, sometimes it’s phrases,” says Izumi of her process. “In art school, I got into trouble because I didn’t really have a sketchbook, and they couldn’t read my handwriting.”
Her art education had a rocky beginning. Izumi floated through art classes and found no real connections with her classmates (who were much younger) or with the media involved. After having little success trying to paint, some friends suggested potting. Clay was no different—at first.
“I was a terrible potter,” jokes Izumi.
Most would give up, move on and shoot for a business degree instead, but Izumi continued with clay and realized she was good at hand building. She eventually found her niche in sculpture art after, ironically, she ran out of art classes to take. She went out on her own and did some research, seeking out the work of other figure artists to reference. In fact, some of these artists were alumni of the John Natsoulas Gallery, where Izumi and Boyd Gavin will be showing later this month.
“Most of the people that I admire have work in his gallery,” says Izumi.
Izumi’s work is a combination of a refined color palette, the use of found objects and an attention to the detailed gestures that each of her characters possesses. Izumi ties all these elements together carefully and methodically in order to achieve what others have described as worn and vintage.
“I’m not a big fan of bright colors,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m a hopelessly conservative Japanese American. I like the worn-out looking colors.”
Her tattered and lonely-looking sculptures have a connection with people who see something of themselves in the scarred, oddly shaped figures. A friend of Izumi’s who had struggled with drugs and spent some time in and out of jail told Izumi that her sculptures looked like “they had a lot of trouble but were still here.”
There is a story inside the work that Izumi is trying to tell. It is a story of struggle and of those trying to work their way out of a rut and do better for themselves. It is the message that she has read between the lines and heard in the small and quiet conversations in the halls of the University of Hawaii where Izumi works as an editor for the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. However, it isn’t earth science and oceanography images that she references as having an impact on her work; rather, it’s the people around her.
“We have 700 faculty at the school. I’ll pick up things that people have said or things that people tell me. I’ll get ideas,” explains Izumi.
Izumi begins with a wire frame that she shapes into her skeletal frame. Then, depending on the piece, she might use newspaper to add girth that she then coats in an aluminum foil wrapping. She compares the appearance of her creatures in this pre-clay state as “cryogenic corpses.” The clay she uses is pricey, about $10 for a package roughly the size of a stick of butter, so mistakes can be costly—it usually requires about three or four sticks to cover the entire area of a sculpture. Once that is finished she coats them in sepia ink and then goes over that with the color. This layering process is what gives some of the sculptures the appearance of leather.
The found objects in Izumi’s sculptures also add an extra depth to her work and help the sculptures venture beyond the formation of clay. Izumi salvaged beakers that the university was tossing out, and she used them for a series of pieces that featured endangered and extinct birds. The sculptures were inspired by a show she did with a friend who was working on a project about endangered animals. It struck a nerve with Izumi.
“I find it fascinating that there’s this bird that used to be alive and now it’s gone forever,” she says. “And all we have is this thing in a glass tube to make a new one. I don’t think it will ever be the same.”
For someone who has a full-time job, a limited art education and no real Web site, Izumi has still managed to produce a complete and studied body of work that has all the right components. At 45, Izumi’s future appears bright with her upcoming West Coast appearance and a show planned for next year in Honolulu, where she currently resides. She’s moving at her own pace, a self-proclaimed slow worker; and frankly, it’s worth the wait.
May Izumi’s thought-provoking creations will be on display at the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis this month along with realist and still life painter Boyd Gavin. The exhibit will run from Jan. 27 to Feb. 20, 2010. An opening reception will be held on Feb. 6 from 7 to 9 p.m.
