This week’s featured artist at the Time Space Gallery in Hanapepe is the glass-bead sculptor and mixed-media artist A. Kimberlin Blackburn.
In this mini-feature show, Blackburn showcases pieces that were created separately, but somehow go together.
This show is a highlight of tonight’s Art Walk in Hanapepe, held every Friday.
“The overview of her pieces work well together, even though they weren’t meant to,” said Time Space Gallery owner and director Antonio Arellanes. “Her mixed-media paintings compliment her sculptures.” One of her works on display is the digital collage, “Arch in Hanapepe.” “It was a collection of family imagery. I took an old picture of my dad in front of a plane, my mom’s Ni‘ihau necklace, and my aunt’s brooch, just things that had sentimental value,” Blackburn said.
“I took flowers from my mother-in-law’s garden.
Putting them all together, they make up their own story.” This is much like her glass-bead sculpture displays that depict people working in a garden, or a dog playing in the water. In a way, the pieces compliment each other, if not by the repeated visual look, like how the look of the Ni‘ihau necklace is similar to the little individual bits of the glass beads, but of how they seem to capture moments in time.
Every piece of art does that, but Blackburn’s work, she explained, has a deeper symbolism to it, because she doesn’t use literal images for the scenes in her paintings.
In her piece, “The Guys Surfing Kealia,” Blackburn painted pyramids surfing against the Nawiliwili coastline.
“It’s the sort of non-specific surfing scene,” she said. “The pyramid symbolizes men, and it’s sort of the symbol instead of painting the actual men.” As she works on her art, from the two-dimensional paintings to the three-dimensional sculptures, her pieces take a more literal form, as if, when they come into the real world, they transform into real shape.
Also on view will be an installation of “Chorus and Chorale” members, painted wooden carvings of flying figures similar to birds, which she describes as being “akin to soaring spirits, a spiritual metaphor for feeling joyful oneness with the universe.” Blackburn’s mini-feature art show is free and open to the public, and is on display from today until Jan. 31.
Lanaly Cabalo, lifestyle writer, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 237) or lcabalo@kauaipubco.com.
