Arial Roots
Kiki McGrath: Aerial Roots and Jean Jinho Kim: No Boundaries
Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, February 17, 2017
Swirls of green suggest the botanical origins of Kiki McGrath’s expressionist abstractions, but the local artist also has drawn on another source, examples of which are part of this Studio Gallery show. Alongside the paintings, “Aerial Roots” displays three sculptures inspired by ikebana — Japanese flower-arranging — and made by local devotees of the art form. These are large, burly and far from traditional. Rather than dainty flowers and grasses, the assemblages feature log-size branches and unnatural accents; one incorporates chunks of vine painted orange. With them, McGrath has installed a black rubber hose, coiled and hanging in midair. The shape of this gardening accessory echoes the spirals in the paintings and pays an amusing tribute to ikebana. The found-object sculpture is not flower-arranging, but it is an act of transformation, and that’s an fundamental theme of Japanese art.
Transformations
Kiki McGrath is an artist who works with loosely representational imagery and disjointed forms to explore complex ideas relating to history, religious practices and literature. Kiki’s works tend toward earthy, neutral colours and the use of traditional media such as acrylic, collage and graphite drawing. The artist’s recent series Transformations takes stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses as inspiration for its imagery. The series is primarily composed of wall-based works on paper that combine drawing and collage techniques. Through the presentation of fragmented bodies, images of mythical creatures and interesting, almost geometric line interventions, Kiki visually represents the bizarre and disorienting nature of the mythology.
By Dallas Jeffs
