Press Release - "Seven Translations For Twilight" by Jean Nagai & Lilah Rose
Jean Nagai
“Upside Down Skull(Sunrise)”
60 x 48 inches
Acrylic, pumice on canvas
2020
pt. 2:
Seven Translations For Twilight
Jean Nagai
Lilah Rose
Opening - October 10, 2020
Showing Through - Friday, November 6, 2020
Schedule a private viewing
info@part2gallery.com
pt. 2 Gallery is pleased to announce Seven Translations for Twilight, an exhibition of new works by Lilah Rose and Jean Nagai. This is Rose and Nagai’s first collaborative exhibition at pt. 2 Gallery.
An exploration of palette and technique is paramount in the new works presented by Rose and Nagai. Rose’s sculptures and Nagai’s paintings acknowledge the importance of surface, opposing moments of luster guide take precedent over image and form. A deep royal blue permeates a number of Nagai’s works, accompanied by darker reds, oranges and purples. These contrast to the lighter tones of warm pink and orange central in Rose’s sculptures. The balance between darkness and light emanates twilight, the first and last moments of the day without the need for artificial light.
In addition to an expanded palette, Rose’s latest work builds on her practice of ‘soft sculpture’ with experimentation in both technique and material. Rose subverts the viewer’s expectations of fabric, a material more often associated with craft than fine art. Working with hand-dyed silk in addition to cotton-based fabrics, Rose’s new sculptures take on an ethereal quality. Many of her newest sculptures introduce a pleated technique, which simultaneously flattens the surface while adding depth. Between these folds hides allegory and nostalgia, revealed subtly through the titles alone.
Nagai’s newest paintings also demonstrate experimentation in surface and palette. Nagai layers dye, acrylic and pumice on his canvases, revealing rhythmic patterns that mirror our emotional reactions to physical places. In his latest work, Nagai pushes both the underpainting and his textural mark-making to the extremes. In the painting Dog Gone the underpainting becomes foreground instead of the background, a myriad of swirling colors portrays a vast, spectral plane. The thick impasto marked by pumice laced acrylic merely highlights this painting. Whereas many of Nagai’s work covered the canvas in marks of pumice before, this work reveals the same concentration of energy, reduced to emphatic lines. In other works, the restrained rhythmic dots give way to thick concentrations of paint.
Lilah Rose
“My San Rafael Swell”
Foam, satin, muslin, fabric dye
74 x 70 x 5 inches
2020
Seven Translations for Twilight examines the abstract connections between language and visual art. While in English we use the work twilight to describe the time when we see illumination from the sun without the sun itself, Nagai’s ancestral Japanese uses seven different words to describe the progressive phases of twilight. Rose’s intricate fabric sculptures and Nagai’s transcendental paintings remind us that art entails its own language. While twilight can be translated in seven ways, Rose and Nagai’s abstractions are open to myriad translations and understandings.
Working to comprehend the loss of a treasured friend and pet, the twilight becomes not just a physical state, but a metaphor for the spectral plane, the time where the soul lingers between this plane and the unknown next step. Rose and Nagai’s sculptures and paintings invite the viewer on a journey of reflection. While twilight marks the closure of one day, it also signifies the dawn of a new day.
Lilah Rose has been a Los Angeles-based soft sculpture artist since 2016. Her process is heavily influenced by upholstery and costume design techniques, both of which she has studied professionally. As a boarding student at Cranbrook Kingswood in her home state of Michigan, Lilah participated in the weaving program and was introduced to the work of Eliel and Loja Saarinen—their “Saarinen House” becoming an enduring source of inspiration. In Olympia, Washington Lilah completed a costume design apprenticeship at the Harlequin Theatre and began to collaborate on fabric installations with Jean Nagai, now her husband. They maintain a studio together in the Los Angeles fashion district.
Jean Nagai has been based in Washington (his home state), New Mexico, Bangkok, and most recently, Los Angeles. His art is deeply informed by the relationships he observes between people and their environments, and he has consistently evolved his painting technique to suit his shifting perspective. Having previously relied primarily on pointillism while working in more rural locations, as a city-based artist he has steadily eroded the boundaries of a single point of paint to the extent that the medium has begun to build upon itself three-dimensionally. Rose and Nagai have exhibited together at Hilde Gallery in Los Angeles in 2018, and at The Hole in New York City in 2020.