Using bold color, dynamic composition, and fragments from life’s experiences to preserve moments in time, contemporary artists Erika Ranee and Michiko Itatani explore themes of place, perception, and memory using their own distinct styles and approaches.
Experience the artists’ captivating works in the Moss Arts Center’s summer exhibitions.
Ranee’s “How Are Things on My End” and Itatani’s “Cosmic Encounters” open on Thursday, June 6, with a reception from 5-7 p.m. in the center’s Grand Lobby. Moss Arts Center Curator Brian Holcombe will lead a tour of the exhibitions at 6 p.m. The galleries and all related events are free and open to the public.
“Erika and Michiko use color on an immersive scale to bring viewers into their worlds,” said Holcombe. “Both push the plastic qualities of paint and application, whether squeezing thick paint lines through a syringe to break the picture plane or embedding flora and studio detritus into thick applications of shellac and acrylic to expand their palette. Each artist builds a color-saturated world of human experiences and emotional memory through materiality and an absence of figuration.”
“How Are Things on My End” features mixed-media paintings and works on paper. These bold, abstract tableaus are comprised of sinewy lines, puddles, and smears of translucent bright colors, broken up by flat shapes of opaque and sometimes muddy colors reminiscent of artist Henri Matisse’s use of cut paper to form compositions. With a mix of the soft and hard edges of the natural and industrial world, Ranee observes and inserts into her fluid compositions a synthesis of the cacophony of city and country life, as well as her own daily gatherings and seclusion.
Ranee pokes fun at selfie culture and the narcissism inherent with being an artist and making art about oneself through the titling of her exhibition and artworks. In the show title, “How Are Things on My End,” she switches “your” with “me.” In doing so, Ranee said, it “flips the switch on typical caring comments” and serves as a “play on selfie/me/vain culture.”
Ranee’s colorful abstract paintings are built through a push-pull application of painting, collage, and décollage methods, which create layered surfaces that embody the raw urgency and physicality reminiscent of action painters and art brut, with a density and flatness seen in graffiti art. Yet Ranee’s interlocking bands of paint and paper produce a luminous, translucent quality like the airy expanses of color field painters. In the painting “I Wonder if I Know What You Mean,” 2022, an ethereal gradient of red-orange to yellow-green radiates behind a field of flat white shapes overlaid with a web of gray and blue lines, as well as drawings of plants and the artist’s niece’s braids. Ranee’s observations of nature and family float suspended in the glowing open spaces of the painting with a stained glass window-like effect.
“Cosmic Encounters” consists of seven large-scale oil paintings depicting imagined interiors of stately concert halls, observatories, libraries, and cathedrals punctuated with otherworldly light and celestial phenomena. Itatani’s imagined architectural spaces, seemingly devoid of human presence, are shrouded in mystery. Under the veil of night, the interior floors come alive with a collection of globes, constellation maps, scientific and musical instruments, and other curiosities placed under starry skies, peering through the glass ceilings of the exaggerated linear perspectives in Itatani’s compositions.
The animated characters in these worlds are patterned luminescent orbs that organize themselves into cascading rings and floating chandeliers or appear as theatre lights. The radiating orbs can be otherworldly or natural phenomena. In several paintings, a trio of chandeliers with rings of glowing orbs resemble alien craft. In others, the hovering yellow orbs mimic fireflies, infiltrating a Gehry-like glasshouse from the forest outside. The lights appear as the only living entities, independent from the fixed interiors. Set against the nighttime scenes, they imply cosmic encounters — like the alien visitations depicted in science fiction stories searching humanity’s caverns of knowledge and seeking contact. Each painting’s upward view makes the viewer look to the heavens, reinforcing the feeling that these lights are otherworldly.
The exhibitions will be on view through Friday, Aug. 30.
Visiting the galleries
Located at 190 Alumni Mall, the Moss Arts Center’s galleries are open on Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m. The center offers many opportunities for students, faculty, and community members to engage with artists and their work. To arrange a group tour of the galleries, contact Laura Higgins.
Katie Gehrt for Virginia Tech
