Exhibition Review
Read what Artillery has to say about this exhibition.
The Harris Gallery is excited to present ‘Secrets for the Moon,’ a two person exhibition featuring works by Ichrio Irie and Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia. Generous support for exhibition programming is provided by the Office of Diversity and Inclusivity.
“The art works of Ichiro Irie call attention to a salient fact of contemporary life—that of dislocation. Expansively considered, they reflect the economic, geographic and cultural displacement of individuals and information. Displacement, set in motion by forces larger than the individual, and which is proceeding at an accelerating pace, may indeed be the central condition of contemporary life. His works achieve this effect indirectly, through the use of images and objects that he freely draws from popular culture or constructs from mass produced consumer goods in a kind of Arte Povera updated for the new millennium—an Arte Consumatore, if you will.
By his own account, his artistic process is a response to the question, “Why am I here?” For Irie, the scope of that question ranges from personal to historical. “Here” is Los Angeles, at this particular moment in his own history—as opposed to Japan, where he was born, and lived until he was the age of two. It necessarily widens to compass an accounting of the geopolitics, trade and foreign relations of Japan with the outside world.
It is in regard to the notions of dislocation and displacement, as reflected in Irie’s work both in its ostensible subjects and referents, and encoded through materials, that I find a compelling association between the works of Irie and Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, which are paired in “Secrets for the Moon” at Harris Gallery by curator Dion Johnson.
Both artists are transplants to Los Angeles, a diverse and cosmopolitan city that absorbs people from around the world—a city with its own history of ruptures and displacements. Yet they are artists who also would be at home in other major cities around the world, which speaks to the decentralized conditions of art production on our current global stage. This resonates particularly for Irie, who spent five years working as an artist in Mexico City, and whose work so astutely expresses displacement.
An apparent tension between the aesthetic displacement and cultural promiscuity at the core of Irie’s oeuvre, and an evident rootedness, in craft, Indigenismo, and place—specifically, Mexico—in Hurtado Segovia’s yields to a deeper reading of their works as addressing different aspects of cultural dislocation. In its fusion of modern formalism and Indigenismo, Hurtado Segovia’s practice employs an almost syncretic aesthetic, speaking directly to a synthesis of aesthetic sources and cultural referents. I find an analog to Hurtado Segovia in the work of the photographer Graciela Iturbide, who references the pre-Columbian history of Mexico that shimmers through the scrim of the modern, Catholic country it is now.”
– Christopher Michno, exhibition essay excerpt 2018