Philadelphia, PA – The series of exhibitions by emerging artists continues at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with Hiro Sakaguchi: No Particular Place to Go, on view in the Morris Gallery, April 2 – August 28, 2011.
Sakaguchi, a 1996 graduate of PAFA, creates fictional worlds in drawings, paintings, and sculptures where human endeavor and interconnections are juxtaposed with natural forces in images that explore the tension between dreams and reality. In Sakaguchi’s world, the violent event is defused and diffused through the miraculous transformations that drawing and painting can effect. The ammunition shot from tanks and planes in Explosion Flowers (2010) bursts into a bouquet of colorful blooms, while a volcano erupts in Secret of Mt. Asama (2010) like an engine spitting jetliners into the sky and taking passengers to far off places. And while, at first, Sakaguchi’s approach might appear whimsical, it is his deliberate disruption of scale and deployment of faux naïve narratives that allow his works to speak openly to the question of how we live and how we imagine we should live.
“Sakaguchi’s work has been exhibited locally and internationally,” says Julien Robson, PAFA’s Curator of Contemporary Art. “His detailed works invite the viewer to intimately engage with the artist’s exploration of wanderlust within a global context. Blending his rigorous education in Western painting with influences from popular comic strips and animation, Sakaguchi composes a collage of the world from found and seen imagery, as well as from observation and memory.”
A native of Japan and living in the States, it is as if Hiro Sakaguchi occupies a space between these two places. It can be thought of as a hybrid space that, while it opens onto both east and west, finds its center in his imagination. Bearing this in mind, Sakaguchi’s exhibition title, No Particular Place to Go, is not so much a commentary on being excluded from his native or adopted lands but, rather, an acknowledgment of his open fascination with wandering between them and absorbing all their influences. Like his watercolor The Climber (2007), Sakaguchi is a traveler on the wing of an aircraft overlooking both the Matterhorn and Mount Fuji. However, while he finds his identity in the conjunction of these two signs, his relationship to the two monoliths is suffused with a nonchalance that ties him to neither.
Born in Nagano Prefecture, Sakaguchi grew up in Tokyo, Japan, and in his twenties came to the United States to pursue a scholarship in the fine arts. A resident of Philadelphia since 1990, in 1993 he obtained a Bachelor's degree from The University of the Arts and in 1996 he was awarded an MFA from PAFA, where he presently teaches in the Continuing Education Program. Sakaguchi has exhibited extensively in the US, Europe, and Japan and is represented by Seraphin Gallery in Philadelphia.
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Founded in 1805, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is America's first school of fine arts and museum. A recipient of the 2005 National Medal of Arts presented by the President of the United States, PAFA is a recognized leader in fine arts education. Nearly every major American artist has taught, studied, or exhibited at the Academy. The institution's world-class collection of American art continues to grow and provides what only a few other art institutions in the world offer: the rare combination of an outstanding museum and an extraordinary faculty known for its commitment to students and for the stature and quality of its artistic work.
Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Academy is located at 118-128 N. Broad Street in Philadelphia. Admission to the Permanent Collection is Adults $10, Seniors (60+) & Students with I.D. $8, Youth ages 13-18, $8. Admission to Special Exhibitions (includes Permanent Collection) is Adults $15, Seniors (60+) & Students with I.D. $12, Youth Ages 13-18, $12. Admission is free for members and children under age of 12. Admission to Morris Gallery exhibitions is free.