October 7th, 2009
The Century Project At Bamboo Grove | Photographer Frank Cordelle wrestles with body acceptance.70 comments
September 30th, 2009
High Art | Tom Cramer resurrects the psychedelic ’60s.3 comments
August 19th, 2009
Shits & Giggles At Launch Pad | Jeremy Okai Davis paints the halcyon days of summer.0 comments
August 12th, 2009
Manor Of Art At Milepost Five | A hundred-plus artists turn a former nursing home into an aesthetic free-for-all.1 comment
July 29th, 2009
Marking Portland Portland Art Museum | Tattoo art graduates from bohemia to the blue-hairs.0 comments
July 8th, 2009
Equivocation (Oregon Shakespeare Festival) | Shakespeare in trouble.2 comments
July 8th, 2009
The Shock of the New Butters Gallery | Butters introduces four new artists to its roster.0 comments
June 17th, 2009
Lesbian Art Show At Fontanelle | Two artists put up a mirror to sapphic identity.0 comments
June 10th, 2009
Jason Low Moon | Checkmate; bang-bang.0 comments
May 13th, 2009
Mary Henry & Ellen George PDX Contemporary | A one-two punch of transcendental abstraction and elegant sculpture.0 comments
![]() Juri Morioka: We Have Plenty of Food for Everyone. |
[October 15th, 2008]
Juri Morioka’s paintings are hard to describe in prose. Try as we would to dissect the Zen influences that color this Japanese artist’s semi-abstract tableaux—strive though we ought to decipher her heady remarks on opening night about “mark-making” and its ability to influence the viewer’s eye movements across the canvas—still we are pulled by the work’s evocative forms into the realm of metaphor.
To try to describe the experience of these compositions is to lose oneself in long, smooth Technicolor muscles, striated with dots of color and round flecks signifying flowers, with squares of gold leaf here and there like little cubes of bullion—or bouillon.
Morioka may profess Buddha and placid Fujiama, but hers is the haiku of her adopted home, New York City; her style is built upon Manhattan’s grid: the Zen of construction and crosswalks and angry honking horns. The vertical influence creeping into her horizon lines chops away at her smooth, out-fanning slices and subdivides them into blocky, apartmentlike chunks. What’s Mine Is Yours, Underground City, and I Can Almost Fly, which evoke the expansive spirit of her Butters show two years ago, have given way to the claustrophobic Voices from the Sky and We Have Plenty of Food for Everyone. Tiny quaint vignettes of geraniums in window-sill planters have surrendered to encroaching circles and mounds. Nature recedes; the city metastasizes.
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Why this twinkly new direction? Are we seeing the artist’s travels in the Middle East—her lectures and art-fair exhibitions in vertiginous Dubai? Perhaps the externalization of her obsession with right-brain/left-brain knowledge theories? Or is this a nascent literalism growing out of her longtime preoccupation, odd for a primarily abstract painter, with Bonnard and Munch?
On opening night, Morioka endeavored to explain. As a talker she is articulate and generous, but her imagery lends itself more to interpolation than interpretation. Perhaps that’s the work’s appeal: It is a poem that is better read by the eyes than explained by the tongue.
RECENT COMMENTS ON “Juri Morioka At Butters”
She had a great show at Merge Gallery but they dropped her. Her works on paper are far superior to her oil paintings.
Here is a link for more on the artist.
http...
Yes, the Merge show was great. I saw it. A lot of artists were there. They didn't drop her by the way. It was a one-off, but there were some hurt feelings when Juri left the gallery at the end of the ...










