Quiet. Contemplative. Compelling. All these qualities are embodied in a subtly beautiful installation on view through Dec. 2 in the small front gallery at PlatteForum.
Rokko Aoyama pays homage to the ancient art of Japanese gardens while managing to create a strikingly contemporary artwork at the same time.
Using mostly natural materials including prairie grasses, river stones, shrub branches and pine-needle bales, she brings the outdoors indoors, assembling an intimate, evocative setting.
At the center of the installation is a flat, perfectly formed field of glistening white sea salt with a conical salt mound jutting up from one end and, at the other, a mesa-like hill topped with an enameled dish filled with black granite sand.
Although there are just these two small mountains, Aoyama mysteriously titled the work “San-Zan (Three Mountains).”
“The third one I left to the imagination of the viewers,” she said. “So what I wanted people to do is just to sit there and contemplate and see what they see in their thoughts.”
Aoyama, who earned her master of fine arts degree in 1998 from Colorado State University, must be counted among the state’s most original, thought-provoking and technically adept artists.
The Fort Collins artist made a splash in 2002 with her breathtaking feather installation at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities. She continues to impress with each artistic outing.
After deciding to execute her take on Japanese gardens, Aoyama consulted with an expert on their history and tradition – Ebi Kondo, senior horticulturalist at Denver Botanic Gardens.
When she began her residency at PlatteForum on Oct. 1, she intended to create a different installation every week until the show’s opening. That proved too difficult, so she settled for three permutations.
“It was hard for a beginner like myself,” she said. “It was impossible to emulate what those monks and trained gardeners do at the gardens in Kyoto. So I was really humbled by it.”
The first consisted of a graceful choreography of knobby, ceramic pieces on a field of salt. The second was dominated by two conical mounds of shredded checks, with their metaphorical overtones.
As distinctive as her installation is, Aoyama is hardly the first contemporary artist to look to Japanese meditative gardens for inspiration. Japanese- born sculptor Isamu Noguchi is probably the best-known artist to draw on their rich traditions.
Aoyama herself made at least an implicit allusion to Japanese gardens before in “Topology,” an ascetic, minimalist exhibition in 2000 featuring ceramic works inspired by Japanese sweets known as manju or omanju.
PlatteForum, a 3-year-old art center at the north end of the Millennium Bridge in the Central Platte Valley, sponsors several artist residencies a year with accompanying exhibitions by the visiting creators and participating students.
With the severe cutbacks at Metropolitan State College of Denver’s Center for Visual Art and its apparent abandonment of its national and international exhibition schedule, PlatteForum is the natural successor.
This small but scrappy organization seems already to be stepping up with its increasingly impressive lineup of visiting artists, including performance artist Sheryl Oring of Brooklyn, N.Y., and filmmaker Sandro del Rosario of Pescara, Italy.
Education is a big part of PlatteForum’s mission; each resident artist must team with a local school. Aoyama worked with 16 students from JeffCo Open School to create an outdoor installation titled “Avant-Garden.”
In preparation for building the piece, the students took part in a Japanese tea ceremony and visited a Japanese garden and the Asian floor at the Denver Art Museum.
Aoyama knew the students would be well versed in pop culture, and wanted to introduced them to older art forms, especially those of Japan.
“I was quite impressed with how open-minded those students were,” she said. “That was quite surprising to me that they were really eager learners and they didn’t find what they experienced foreign or exotic.”
Past and present, East and West, youth and experience all merging in two successful, thought-provoking installations. It’s hard to ask much more of an artist residency than that.
“San-Zan (Three Mountains)”
Through Dec. 2|Art installation by Rokko Aoyama|PlatteForum, 1610 Little Raven St.|Free|Noon to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays (303-893-0791; platteforum.org)
“Contrasts in Contemporary and Traditional Japanese Garden Design”
Presentation by artist Rokko Aoyama and Ebi Kondo, senior horticulturalist, Denver Botanic Gardens|PlatteForum; 10 a.m. Saturday|Free but reservations required| 303-893-0791; programs@platteforum.org.
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TSEHAI JOHNSON Johnson, one of the state’s more original and technically adept ceramicists, is among three artists spotlighted at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 1750 13th St. Their concurrent exhibitions continue through Dec. 31. 303-443-2122 or bmoca.org.
STUDIO AIELLO This intrepid warehouse space at 3563 Walnut St. is closing after three years. Its final exhibition, featuring work by three area artists – Jerry Gilmore, Julie Puma and Sandy Lane – opens today with a reception from 6 to 10 p.m. 303-297-8166 or studioaiello.com.
-Kyle MacMillan
