RAKUKO NAITO
&
ZACHARY ROYER
SCHOLZ
THOUGTS IN CIRCLES AND SQUARES
OCTOBER 8 - NOVEMBER 8, 2009
Opening reception: Thursday, October 8 , from 6 to 9 pm
NOMA GALLERY is proud to present a pair of intersecting solo exhibitions by Rakuko Naito and Zachary Royer Scholz. Both of these artists deftly probe the territories of chaos, structure, action, and habit. In combination, the works in this exhibition prompt introspection even as they suggest new and surprising potentials.
Tokyo-born Rakuko Naito has lived and worked in New York since 1958. Influenced by the traditional arts of her native Japan and intimately involved in both the Op Art and Minimalist movements, her work has always defied easy classification. Texturally opulent, materiality reductive, and spiritually meditative, her works in, not on, paper echo repetitive natural forms without ever succumbing to mimicry. Meticulously constructed, by repeatedly rolling, folding, or tearing paper, Naito’s fields of accumulated gestures evoke expanses extending beyond the boundaries of the square white shadow boxes and wire mesh cubes that contain them.
Though rougher hewn, the works of San Francisco’s Zachary Royer Scholz, are no less refined. Drawing on deconstructionist praxis, west coast conceptualism, and post minimalist aesthetics, Scholz interacts with everyday objects, sites, and situations. The resulting works, executed in a wide range of materials, investigate reciprocal constructions of material and meaning. For this exhibition, Scholz has turned his attention to circles, producing various iterations of circular forms. These works explore the structural, habitual, and philosophical implications of circling, from the celestial to the quotidian.