Kjell Hahn

i was helping my neighbor Mr. Noguchi store some paintings next door and he gave me some fancy aluminum pots and pans. i got distracted when i was supposed to be cooking and took out the camera.
(think i got the high quality video thing fixed without having to go to youtube)

I was stressed out about work, galleries, money and all kinds of fun stuff so i went hiking through the mountains near my house today.   logging areas dot the landscape around here and i came across a few on my walk.  I heard somewhere that the planted forests that cover the mountains are too dense and the trees would just choke one another if they weren’t thinned, but that doesn’t really explain clear cutting.   I’m not sure why they do it since the logging companies often leave most of the trees behind.

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*all photos taken with a canon g10

**again, bugs have yet to be fixed with a wordpress update, sorry.

i went out again with the camera with the intention taking some interesting macro shots of the neighborhood.   I have a 50 mm macro lens for taking shots of small drawings and sculptures but havent really used it for “creative” photography.  i only had a few minutes to play around with the camera and when i got back i realized that most of the photographs weren’t that great.  so, im just going to post two of them today.

*note:  I have recently updated to wordpress 2.7.  on the administrator side it has been quite buggy so if you find the blog acting up i apologize. you’ll notice in this post it keeps moving the order of the images around. everything should run smoother with the next update.

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finally a new group of completed works,  titled ” p e r s o n a g e “.  Without a tangible subject matter like people or oni, Personage became a process of taking organic shapes, lines and forms of the observed world and assembling them in an environment of paint.  The tendency to pull away from representational work started with the Oni Landscape series but these paintings make that transition complete.

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im printing several of these off today and taking them down to tokyo monday.

i think 3, 5, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19 are the strongest.  interestingly i was much more satisfied with the works on paper at the beginning and kept struggling with the MDF and wood pieces but in the end i think the opposite ended up being true.  most of the paper works just dont have the depth the pieces on wood have.

we had a long, cold rainy today.  i spent most of the afternoon painting in the studio even though i promised myself i would be working on writing an artist statement.  i hate that kind of stuff… it always feels like i am lying when i write it.

i was looking to get out of the house so I walked down to the river with my canon g10 to enjoy the few minutes the sun decided to break through the clouds. walking around the neighborhood with my camera looking for something to shoot i realized how many diverse things there are around here.  within a 10 minute walk from my house there is a quarry, recycling plant, a river, a hydroelectric plant and cows.  where i grew up in missouri there were at least two other identical homes and a bunch of grass in that same area…  hopefully i make a habit of these kinds of walks and get a solid group of photographs that capture the area.

in november i worked with akira yonebayashi よねばやし　あきら　(neba) holding a ceramics workshop at my home/studio.

the following pieces are the result of that collaboration.

neba has two kilns sitting at his parents’ house in kanagawa, i have a kiln and a burner in himeji, but we dont have a place to regularly fire pots.  we’ve been looking at spaces in the area a bit outside of town where no one will complain about smoke/noise.  i hope this gets resolved in the near future so i can work on some bigger pieces and do some more experimentation. oh wait, i forgot i dont have a job.

part I of a two part performance and painting video series with kjell hahn (キール　ハーン）working with chiaki horikoshi (堀越千秋), yuko takamura (高村木綿子) and tomoko miyata (宮田ともこ) on a flamenco theater set for prestige theater (プレステージ　テアトロ)in tokyo, japan in december, 2008.
(again- you want to click here to view in high quality)

artist links:
yuko (mome) takamura
chiaki horikoshi

done made me a mailbox covered with the Onis.  up until now my mailbox was just a brick sitting on a board outside.  seems to be a hit with the neighborhood kiddies.

Oya Masamoto (大矢まさもと) and his father were kind enough to let me use a corner of their massive, rundown leather factory when i lived in himeji (姫路） in 2006-2007.  the leather industry has hit some hard times in japan.  30 years ago the Oya’s factory had over 20 full-time employees, but now there is barely enough work for the two of them.  most of the leather businesses in the area have already gone under or find themselves in a similar situation.  i guess a lot of the factory owners are waiting for everyone else to go out of business so they might be able to squeak by on the remaining sales.  the trouble is the leather business doesn’t have much flexibility.  there isn’t much one can do with land with seeped in chemicals for 100 years.  no new development can replace the empty factories covering the town without first removing the top 12 feet of soil, probably not the easiest thing when you are 15 feet above sea level.  anyway, the Oya’s factory like many others in the neighborhood is literally falling apart- with chunks of the roof caving in every time it storms.  the structures are beat-up and maybe a little dangerous, but there is something kind of sweet and sad about the area.  you find yourself daydreaming a lot there.  sometimes when the arting wasn’t going well i’d go exploring around the buildings.  i’d come across rooms or machines that were just frozen there.  people would use an office or whatever for years then one day just stop.  nothing cleaned up or put away, just like it was the last day they used it. in the Oya’s factory  there are rooms and rooms of bus-sized machines that probably havent moved once during my whole life.

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i went around the last time I stayed in himeji and took some shots of the factory.   tried to match up the video with different kinds of music and when i realized that hammer time lined up just right i couldnt help myself.  maybe its a little lame, but it laughed when it rendered.
(high quality through youtube)

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