It is difficult to put to words, the emotions that surface from within when viewing Audrey Kawasaki’s work. I can’t help but see parallels of her work to Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s pre-Raphaelite art, whose art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism – Bocca Baciata (1859) for example.
For those unfamiliar with Kawasaki, she is an LA based artist influenced by both manga comics and the Art Nouveau scene in which she grew up. The figures she paints captures and personifies an inner Lolita. Often a girl, She expresses a haunting and sensual melancholy that is sometimes avertive and sometimes daring.
I thought it marginally humourous to find that heavily pensive part of myself being reflected, even personified, in Kawasaki’s works. Admittedly, I am by far not as sultry as that She in Kawasaki’s works, still the renditions of Her gave me a interesting insight into the third aspect of a portrait, that of the Model who can often times be overlooked in the process of Interpretation, while that of the Artist and the Viewer is often taken for granted.
Right: I’ll Stay Here, mixed media on wood by Audrey Kawasaki, 2008.
Photos of CM Cordeiro-Nilsson by JE Nilsson and Geoffrey Pereira © 2011
Right: Carry On, oil and graphite on wood by Audrey Kawasaki, 2009.
Right: Migawari, oil and graphite on wood by Audrey Kawasaki, 2009.
From the point of view of the Viewer, I can’t help but contemplate art through the eyes of discourse analysis theories, often referring back in particular, to Fairclough’s framework of the interaction of the production of the text, its context of both production and viewing / reading and subsequent interpretation of it.
Discourse as text, interaction and context by Norman Fairclough, Language and Power, 1989:25.
As within my own academic area of interest I can’t help placing a certain distance between the Self and the Interpretation of the text and the point of view, I think what captivated me in coming across Kawasaki’s works is how she portrays her motifs that close quite some distance between Self and Interpretation, blurring even, the boundaries between.
One of my favourite profiles of Audrey Kawasaki is in this article in LA Weekly, entiteld, Audrey Kawasaki: Girl Chaser by By Gendy Alimurung (Thursday, May 19 2011), where she talks about That Girl… most often melancholy, sometimes elusive… though perhaps, always Within.