Eugene Weekly : Visual Art : 06.15.06

Culturesphere, Ecosphere

Aesthetics, sex and the environment combine.

BY SYLVIE PEDERSON

Medium, style and subject matter distinguish the works of painter Masami Teraoka and photographer Christopher Landis, currently on display at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, yet they share a common trait: both bring socio-cultural issues to the fore without sacrificing aesthetics.

Although at a distance one might mistake his earlier watercolors for woodblock prints in the traditional Japanese ukiyo-e manner, Teraoka is a painter, not a printmaker. A few of his works, however, were done using various printmaking processes. The JSMA's small exhibit, entitled "Selected Prints," includes one of his only true woodblock prints, the well-known 31 Flavors Invading Japan (1982), executed by master printer Tadakatsu Takamizawa.

Salton Bay Yacht Club, Nash Editions Iris Print by Christopher Landis

The works in this selection, ranging from 1979 to 1993, belong to Teraoka's earlier period, during which the artist, Japanese-born but trained in Western art at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, adopted the stylistic vocabulary of ukiyo-e and, combining it with Pop Art iconography, subverted it into a flexible aesthetic vehicle that allowed him to investigate a broad range of contemporary social and political issues.

At a time when conceptual art dominated, Teraoka consciously chose figurative and narrative forms of expression, and he has remained faithful to them. In the 1990s, when European late medieval and Renaissance art began informing Teraoka's paintings, the narrative element and social satire in his work increased in complexity. Coupling recognizable historical styles and imagery with running cultural commentaries informed by an idiosyncratic imagination has resulted in art works that belong to no pre-existing category.

Teraoka's 31 Flavors Invading Japan series (Today's Special and French Vanilla) addresses cross-cultural issues by juxtaposing East and West in mild satire. In each, a female figure in a kimono holds an ice cream cone. The first is a Western woman, and though she makes an effort to adapt to Japanese customs, she also brings her own food culture with her. The second, a geisha, represents traditional Japanese people and their attempt to adopt Western ways. Food and displays of sexuality are combined: an obscenely long tongue licking ice cream, the reflection of a female body in a bikini and a calligraphic phallus chasing after its own tail in narcissistic pursuit. The public presentation of the female body in the West and the predicament this creates for a Japanese man of Teraoka's generation are humorously depicted in Longing Samurai, with its stylistic debt to Hokusai.

AIDS Series / Geisha & Ghost Cat, aquatint and etching by Masami Teraoka

The battle for cultural hegemony is succinctly symbolized in McDonald's Hamburgers Invading Japan / Burger & Bamboo Broom, in which a traditional bamboo broom faces off against a hamburger. Teraoka's mastery of his craft is everywhere in evidence in the flowing lines of these elegant compositions.

In his darker AIDS Series begun in 1986, Teraoka issues warnings that AIDS is an epidemic that concerns everyone and admonishes the careless without preaching or issuing moral judgment. Four small etchings draw on the tradition of the erotic shunga – "images of spring." Geisha & Ghost Cat updates folklore motifs: out of a condom box rises the ghost of a giant cat holding a geisha between his jaws.

A photographer and historian, Landis combines art and historic documentation in his visual record of the Salton Sea, begun in 1990. The Salton Sea was formed in 1905 when the Colorado River burst through irrigation controls and for two years flooded the dry Salton Basin, once a prehistoric lake. In the 1950s and 1960s, developers touted "California's New Mediterranean" as a vacation paradise replete with gated subdivisions and golf courses. The Salton did become a popular site for boat racing in the 1960s but none of the developers' dreams materialized.

The Salton has survived in the hot Sonoran desert because of its symbiotic relationship with the neighboring Imperial Valley agricultural land. It is an official agricultural drainage reservoir, without which neither it nor the agriculture industry could survive.

The Salton Sea has become a crucial wetland habitat, a critical stopover for migratory birds, a marvel of avian biodiversity with over 400 bird species recorded, and a productive fishery. It is also beset with environmental problems. Nutrients from fertilizers make algae proliferate, and their summer "bloom" depletes the water's oxygen, choking millions of fish to death. High levels of salinity due to evaporation pose another environmental threat. Keeping the Salton alive and healthy is not just an ecological battle but a political one. Landis' April lecture at the JSMA was relevant to everyone interested in art, ecology and the saga of human politics.

The exhibited sample of Landis' dramatic Iris prints by Nash Editions focuses not on the human presence at the Sea but on the human relics in this desert landscape. The marks left by humans bear testimony to their dreams, enterprise, folly, greed, and that perennial battle for control of the environment.

The distortion of a super-wide lens contributes a sense of eeriness and the vertigo of precipitously merging parallels; even clouds seem to move at speed toward a single vortex. In the middle of a flat, rugged expanse under these roiling skies, remnants of a city that never was stand alone, absurd and poignant: a golf flag on barren soil, an empty pool, gates to unbuilt subdivisions, an abandoned yacht club, a stop sign without a cross-road and street-signs without streets. The artist's sensibility allows these prints to stand on their own as aesthetic objects. These are not mere documentary images. They possess a timeless aesthetic and allegorical quality.

"Masami Teraoka: Selected Prints" runs through June 18, and "The Salton Riviera: Photography by Christopher Landis" runs through June 25 at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.