Playful creations conjured by friends on either side of studio wall

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This article was published 13/06/2025 (498 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For more than a month, visual artist Takashi Iwasaki and artist/designer Joseph Kalturnyk worked on their joint exhibition Halcyon / Kawasemi together, but apart.

In the galleries at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, the longtime friends and Nuit Blanche collaborators created art in their own spaces, knowing the other was just on the other side of the wall.

“It was really fun,” says Kalturnyk, who is the founder of RAW: Gallery of Architecture and Design and the designer behind the RAW:almond pop-up restaurants.

“While Takashi’s bending the wood and making his piece over there, I was in here, and I could say, ‘Hey, check this out — what do you think?’ It’s like having a studio partner.”

Iwasaki says he appreciated being able to draw on Kalturnyk’s skill set, which is different from his own.

“He’s got this architectural background, he was a contractor in the past, so he has lots of skills in building things and certain manoeuvres that I can’t come up with,” says Iwasaki, who was born in Japan and moved to Winnipeg in 2002 and earned a BFA at the University of Manitoba.

“So when I ask questions, it’s instant for him, and maybe vice versa in some instances.”

But despite being created independently, both sides of the exhibition sit in conversation with each other.

Halcyon is a retrospective of Iwasaki’s art, with works from as early as 2005. His practice spans artistic mediums — oil paint, sculpture, embroidery, woodworking and ceramics — but the pieces that compose this exhibition are all united by two things: bold, riotous colour and a sense of play.

“I like things that are uplifting for myself and for the viewers, too. And organic shapes, biomorphic shapes rather than rectangles,” Iwasaki says.

Indeed, the only square or rectangle you’ll encounter in Iwasaki’s work is the frame.

“I like the idea of organic shapes. I think that’s something I really feel connected to, and probably it’s the same for a lot of people. And sometimes it’s also technical too. (Organic shapes) are technically challenging. Straight lines are easy to make,” he says.

He references the famous quote from renowned 19th-century architect Antoni Gaudi: “The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God.”

“I don’t maybe use the same connection, but I feel something closer to that,” he says.

Iwasaki’s sense of humour is everywhere. There is a curvy, free-standing sculpture painted in ocean blues he simply calls Floor Lamp since, very technically speaking, that’s what it is.

But it also looks like it could be found growing in a coral reef.

He’s not a landscape artist in the traditional sense, but his works look like landscapes you might find in the clouds, in outer space, under the sea or under a microscope. There’s a liminal, floating quality to them.

But he’s also full of surprises, such as the large-scale lattice screens created using traditional Japanese woodworking methods. Those pieces are almost the inverse of the others: clean, grid-like lines, but they are framed out in ovals.

The embroidered works are the most whimsical. Iwasaki picked up embroidery in art school and stuck with it — not only for its meditative qualities but the fact that, unlike paint, thread is already dry.

Embroidery is also easy to pick up and put down as well as being incredibly portable, attractive qualities when, like Iwasaki, you have two young kids vying for your attention.

Through neon-hued embroidery floss, Iwasaki can transform a mundane scene into abstract art. His 2009 embroidered work Haremeazorekenoboushi, for example, was inspired by a pal navigating a cold day.

“A friend of mine came with a ponytail. She had a fur hat and skinny jeans, and it was winter, and her one ear was red, but the other was blue. This is her teary eye,” he says, pointing to what looks like a small bird.

Each of these elements exists separately from each other in black negative space. The ponytail looks like a tentacled figure, or the nipped-waist of a parka-clad woman wearing one red mitt and one blue one. The skinny jeans appear as bright turquoise slashes, extending upwards from a mint green eye with a pool of swimming-pool blue tears about to spill over a hot-pink lid.

“The colours are not realistic,” Iwasaki deadpans.

Kalturnyk’s installation Kawasemi gives one the sensation that they are inside one of Iwasaki’s works.

“I felt like it would be really, really amazing to see one of his little figures in three dimensions, kind of floating in midair,” Kalturnyk says.

And so, using UV light and little tabs of neon fluorescent tape, Kalturnyk created a three-dimensional shape suspended on a rotating spool of cords inspired by a Japanese folk tale about a Kawasemi (or Kingfisher) bird.

For the designer, creating Kawasemi offered him a chance to use a different part of his brain.

“I don’t get to spend a lot of time in that (space). Most of the time, you come up with the concept, and you spend a bit of time refining it, and then the rest is just running around to get it done.”

The installation was intended to be spun by hand. Here, it revolves on its own and can be viewed from the street.

“We adapted it for this show to be motorized, so that at night we can open up the curtains and it’s a show for the cars,” Kalturnyk says.

You can’t take the public art out of the public artist. Halcyon / Kawasemi is on view until late July.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca