John Natsoulas Gallery

Exhibition Dates: March 5 – March 29, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 8th, 7-9 pm
Valentine Champagne Gala: February 9th, 7-10 pm

Yoshio Taylor is one of the leaders of the figurative ceramic sculpture movement in California, with his life-sized figures harkening back to his roots in Japan. His monumental art pieces such as the Clock Tower in Sacramento puts him on the map. Many of Yoshio Taylor’s figures exude a feeling of calmness and repose, which is often contrasted with energetic movement in the decoration of the figures and in their imaginative headdresses. “Calmness is always there,” Taylor says, “but there are always forces to throw you off balance, and my figures struggle with them, trying to achieve that balance.”

All of Taylor’s images reflect his Japanese-American heritage. His masks have an exceptional way of emitting emotions through restrained changes in its facial features. He explains that in the Japanese culture one tries to hide true feelings to appear emotionally leveled in public. “In a way, we wear masks all the time;” Taylor conveys this concept by creating tranquil and quasi-expressionless masks with a subtle façade, a semi-open mouth as if begging to speak, or tears marking the eye, as if granting the viewer a glance at the emotions stirring inside.

Taylor received his BA from California State University, Sacramento and received his MFA at the University of California, Berkeley while studying with Peter Voulkos. Taylor has become a central icon teaching in Northern California for the past 30 years, producing some of the top students in the region, and is currently the head of the art department at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento. His major exhibits include those at Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA; Society for Contemporary Crafts, Pittsburgh, PA; Dorothy Weiss Gallery, San Francisco; Crafts and Folk Art Museum, San Francisco, and Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento.

Frank Damiano

“My current group of still life paintings examines the ability of inanimate objects to communicate through the use of form and color. Using common objects, clippings from books and magazines and a contextual format that builds a singularity amongst a group, the identity of the painting changes and becomes a source of questions rather than answers. Changing traditions and the struggle of dominance are two themes that are most apparent.” - Frank Damiano

Frank Damiano creates luminosity in his work by creating layers on top of layers much like European Baroque masters Degas and Vermeer. Damiano’s art contains a new-world/old-world juxtaposition: a serious academic subject matter with a modern icon or imagery. His work always had an emblematic side; in his early collages and paintings, objects were arranged as one would find them displayed in traditional heraldry. His objects are symbolic rather than actual.

The Italian painter Giorgio Morandi is often a crucial reference for Damiano in the creation of compact assemblages of domestic objects. It is clear that his magnetism to Morandi has been due to the extreme simplicity of the forms. However, there are many significant differences; Morandi’s instinct was to compress his assemblages of bottles and vases into a compressed blocky mass. Damiano, on the other hand, expanded the concept of traditional realism by featuring kitsch ornaments to combine other visual elements together and creating a complex dialogue between different modes of representation and different levels of visual culture, as is present in his 2007 painting Shark.

Damiano graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Central Washington University and received his Master of Arts at the University of California, Davis in 1985.