Idyllic impermanence

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This article was published 14/06/2025 (468 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHAT IT IS: Titled The Songs of Neocaridina and I’ve Got So Much to Tell You, these paired works by Winnipeg artist Takashi Iwasaki are hand-embroidered with cotton thread on black twill fabric. Vivid, vibrant, exuberant, they are part of Halcyon / Kawasemi, a two-person show now on view at Plug In ICA, featuring art by Iwasaki and Joe Kalturnyk.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: The exhibition’s double title references a bird — a kingfisher — that appears in both a Japanese folk tale and a Greek metamorphosis myth. The bird was thought to lay its eggs during a brief winter stretch when the ocean’s waters were calm, so that the phrase “halcyon days” has come to suggest a time of peace and contentment.

Born in Hokkaido, Japan, Iwasaki has been living and working in Winnipeg since 2002, when he came here to study at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art. The 42-year-old artist’s practice includes embroidery, painting, collage, woodworking, ceramics and large-scale public art — he collaborated with Nadi Group on that joyful light installation at the Kildonan Park duck pond — but whatever the medium, Iwasaki’s art radiates beauty and happiness.

Iwasaki’s works in this show riff on sea creatures and birds, fruits and seeds, elephants and aliens. The Songs of Neocaridina and I’ve Got So Much to Tell You could be classified as biomorphic abstraction. Their rounded, organic shapes and crowded, multicoloured dynamism suggest not just individual life-forms — neocaridina is a type of shrimp — but the primal force of life itself, always reaching, growing, transforming.

With their wandering lines and bright, pop art-inflected hues, the two works might read at first as spontaneous explosions of energy. But Iwasaki’s needlework process is actually slow, methodical and painstaking, which makes for an interesting kind of tension.

WHY IT MATTERS: There’s another tension in these two pieces and in the show as a whole. The phrase “halcyon days” suggests a time of perfect happiness, but there’s also the melancholy implication that this moment is brief and passing, a temporary calm in a larger sea of tumult and trouble.

We are living in times of tumult and trouble, and this is a halcyon show, a happy, cheerful, playful mood-booster, a jolt of pure emotional and physical pleasure. This includes not just Takashi’s work but the interactive and immersive installation by Kalturnyk, which references the kingfisher’s search for light in the Japanese tale but also — with its trippy use of colour and luminosity — seems to call up Lite-Brite toys, black-light posters in teenage bedrooms and glow-stick dance parties.

While this exhibition is packed with wonder and delight and out-and-out gorgeousness, it shouldn’t be dismissed as escapism. (Respite, yes. Escapism, no.)

There have been periods when art theorists have frowned on beauty, seeing it as serving the social status quo, papering over ugly realities, lulling viewers into easy complacency.

Lately, though, many artists and critics have advocated for the radical power of joy and beauty, seeing them as tools for community, connection and transformative creativity.

If you want to work toward a better world, you have to be able to imagine it, and that’s what Iwasaki’s art offers — a sudden, dizzying glimpse of human happiness.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca