Caprice Taniguchi, Sculptures; Howard Hersh, Paintings

Caprice Taniguchi, Sculpture
Howard Hersh, Painting
Shidoni Contemporaty Gallery
Bishop’s Lodger Rd., Tesuque

by Christine Hemp
The Magazine
Volume IV, Number 5
November 1995

I recently heard a clay artist say the only difference between a vase and a vessel is the price. This rule certainly applies to Caprice Taniguchi’s wooden sculptures, many of which are titled Vessel. Pricey though they may be, I daresay you couldn’t drink a warm Guinness out of one of them. First, they are carved from wood, but from a distance they certainly look like clay. Secondly, most of them have holes, like those shells whose walls have been worn through by waves. Taniguchi’s vessels cannot hold liquid, but because of their shell shapes they relate to water. In spite of the unusual patina (white and chalky), I found them interesting individually, but bland as a group. They contain few challenging juxtapositions. After seeing one pale clambone, I’d seen them all. Only one, Fiber Shell, plumbed a notable depth. Its open oyster-shell wall is lined with red twigs, perhaps willow, each wrapped in black string. Twigs inside shells trigger startling associations, a forest inside the sea. Though both materials are wood, they couldn’t appear more disparate.

Except for a few diversions, Howard Hersh’s dreamy flowers painted in oil say little we haven’t heard before in Santa Fe. His blue-green layers over leaves left me nonplussed; I ached for a distinct voice. something to perk up and listen to. The monotypes, like Organizing (1st State) and Organizing (2nd State) are fresh because Hersh has chosen to show stages of printing one image. Like a photograph which slowly comes into focus, these reveal the unpredictable nature of monotypes. Most of Hersh’s work in this show is oil on canvas, however, and the most compelling pair, High Bush and Lime Mallow, hangs on the back wall. As in Taniguchi’s piece with the surprising branches, Hersh’s pair reflects a lively tension, both individually and together. The thickly applied paint and expressive brush strokes woke me up. A green pod shape in one complements the leafy abstractions in the other. The colors are bolder and the shapes more reckless than the rest of the work. In these two pieces I felt a departure from safe imagery and composition. Like the angry splat of red in the middle of Lime Mallow (or the red willows in Taniguchi’s Fiber Shelf), this pair gives you something to bump up against, to make you look again.