Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10 AM - 5 PM

The Arts Council of Lake Oswego is opening its first 2024 exhibit, Moon Rabbit, featuring two Washington-born artists, Jean Isamu Nagai and Ash Wyatt. The public is invited to attend the opening reception on Saturday, February 17, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Nagai and Wyatt's work features highly textured, abstracted landscapes where temporal forms come into and out of view, like the shape-shifting of clouds in the sky or seeing a rabbit on the moon. Both artists engage in meditative or trance-like processes of repetitive mark-making.

Ash Wyatt’s stoic imagery, made from soft materials such as horsehair, wool, cotton, and vintage linens, appears spacious and gestural yet methodical within the painstaking processes of tufting and embroidery. At the root of her artwork is a deep connection to ancestry and nature. In her handwork, she sees her mother and grandmother's hands. The piece La Montaña en La Otro translates to English as The Mountain in the Other and speaks to the deep psychological work she is enmeshed in as a student earning her Master's degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Portland State University. In a recent conversation with Wyatt, she suggested that getting lost while doing her work was a sign she was going in the right direction.

While Wyatt’s work transforms the soft into the heavy, Jean Isamu Nagai’s ethereal pointillistic color field paintings are gritty by the integration of pumice. Each dot within Nagai’s paintings represents a moment in time, amassing into a vibrating field of interconnected points. The dots float above fluid background gradients. Subtle connections to the natural environment imbue this seemingly non-representational work with inferences of ant colonies and mycorrhizal mushroom networks. Nagai sometimes combines mushroom spores into his paint mediums, and in the past, he has even listed smog as media in his work. Nagai shares that his inclusion of pumice “relates to the thin layer of earth of the Pacific Rim and the Ring of Fire, a horseshoe-shaped string of volcanoes, mountains, and oceanic trenches that connects Japan and the west coast of the United States.” Nagai’s inquiries are both mystic and scientific.

Moon Rabbit will be on view from February 17 through May 10 at ARTspace. ARTspace is a nonprofit gallery located at 380 A Avenue in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and open Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information about the show and Jean Isamu Nagai and Ash Wyatt, visit artscouncillo.org.