On Sunday October 26th, Steve Nishimoto’s solo exhibition, “CESSATION” will open at Pablo’s Birthday gallery, 57 Orchard St. in the lower east side of Manhattan.
Translating the onslaught, hunkered down in the trough of the waves of detritus that threaten to drown us all, Steve Nishimoto goes microscopic on the legacy of the nascent 20th century’s rebellious realists, the Ashcan School. Where artist like Robert Henri, John French Sloan and Jacob Riis turned away from drawing room subjects of their Gilded Age predecessors to focus on the details and dirt in the lives of mundane moments, Nishimoto zeros in on the life of dirt itself. He seeks out patterns left by what is accrued and trampled underfoot. He recreates conditions that produce the pounded, grounded, besotted muck with which humanity is constantly at war. He multiplies and magnifies so that we may see the beauty in the chaos of everything by showing sublime and familiar images that can emerge from shapes that can be taken by our perpetual enemy. In the processed based abstractions of his new solo show, “CESSATION”, mercurial shadowy faces, celestial snapshots and hypnotic mathematical charts are conjured on canvas by harnessing some of the sources of grime in our lives and our fair city.