Schneider Museum of Art
The works of Mari Omori at the
Intimate Revelations Exhibition
In A Dream by Maritta Tapanainen
2003
Wisdom of One by Maritta
Tapanainen, 2003
Wayward Way by Maritta
Tapanainen, 2001
Intimate Revelations
International Women's Exhibition (continued: Page 4)
Mari Omori
Mari was born and educated in Japan, today she lives in Texas, but Japan lives inside of her. We have known each other for many years and I have admired her work for as many years. It was always exacting and almost obsessive in its intensity – beginning with the earliest drawings almost photo-realist in imagery to the subsequent series which seemed almost otherworldly to me, flowing like molten rivers of black and grey.
I will always remember a series she did, following the death of her mother, depicting a successively dissolving kimono being slowly engulfed by Japanese characters, like incantations enveloping the drawing and progressively covering the page.
Another unforgettable series was titled Black Rain, whose content alluded to the radioactive clouds carrying the rains which followed the atomic bomb explosions. There too, ominous feelings and ideas were conveyed through abstract marks progressively coalescing into dark forms which engulfed the white area of each page.
Things have changed over the years turning the tragic into more philosophical attitudes more measured, wiser, more balanced views about life. Poetry entered the arena, transforming objects once designed to be functional, into art.
Everything underwent transitions, rites of passage or metamorphoses. Small stained fragments of paper, once used as tea bags were magically changed into monumental works of the imagination.
The magic consisted of ideas to begin with; these had to be carried to fruition by unrelenting focus, sustained by infinite patience, endless hard work and the willingness to devote the time needed to complete the task. Thus art became art, while simultaneously emerging as a meditation about life on this earth.
Maritta Tapanainen
Maritta was born and educated in Finland; she spent some years in Canada and now lives in Santa Monica, California. She uses collage as the medium of her choice and the results are unlike any collage I have ever encountered.
Perhaps a few introductory remarks about the term “collage” would be in order. The artists who invented collage (from the French word coller - which means to paste or glue) were Picasso and Braque. That was almost 100 years ago, in 1912, when they pasted newspaper fragments and other pre-printed materials into their drawings and paintings. Thus a remnant of reality was incorporated into fictional representation.
Collage has since become a universally accepted medium as a technique used to include elements designed for practical purposes or commercial use, into works of art- such as a red bus ticket pasted into a drawing in lieu of red pigment. Collage was later expanded to include three dimensional, often found objects, into works of art. The technical term for such works is assemblage. Some artists have made collage and assemblage the core of their work.
Maritta Tapanainen is one of these artists. She cut out and pastes fragments from printed matter and re-arranges them, giving them a new identity as art. Her collages look like secret maps or strange combinations of symbols or a new, obscure form of communication like cuneiform writing. She finds shapes, diagrams, linear or geometric configurations, cuts them out and pastes them into compositions of her own, small, exquisite gardens where lines converge and grow. Some take on the appearance of scrambled musical notations becoming rhythmic harmonies of black, white and grey.
These are intimate, delicate and beautifully balanced worlds all their own. Their modest presence in no way diminishes their impact; in the tradition of art like Persian miniatures or the works of Kurt Schwitters or Paul Klee, these choreographies of lines and shapes capture attention by their powerful yet delicate presence.
The work has a unique graphic quality – consistent from piece to piece – each different, yet related, because it is the voice of a distinct sensibility – restrained, refined and highly original.
More Intimate Revelations:
Pg. 1: Yolanda Andrade Pg. 2: Belkis Ayon Pg. 3: Christel Dillbohner
Pg. 5: Kyung Sun Cho/Theodora Varney Jones/Echiko Ohira
Pg. 6: Sosa Joseph Pg. 7: Younhee Paik
