Garden Delights | monotype | 2013
The almost-organic shapes and forms that make up a delightful new show of Kim Hoffman’s prints and sculpture at the White Lotus Gallery downtown seem to grow from the world of microbiology.
In the prints, they seem to float under the lens, something like the abstract skeletons that make up diatomaceous earth, or perhaps exquisitely tiny tapeworms swimming with large tails and tiny heads.
The wall-hanging sculptures, on the other hand, offer more substance. Finely crafted from light-colored hardwoods, they offer three-dimensional versions of the smaller two-dimensional shapes in the prints.
Both Hoffman’s prints and his sculptures bring right to mind a quite different show that you can also see in Eugene at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.
There, New York ceramic artist and painter Ryo Toyonaga has similarly created a world of improbable but convincing organic forms – his in ceramics – and then represented those forms in an abstract world in a series of paintings and prints.
Toyonaga’s work is darker and creepier; Hoffman’s is lighter and more whimsical, drawing on soft colors and almost cartoonish representation in the prints and the inviting warmth of fine woodworking in the sculpture.
Stage of Life | 2012 | mixed hardwoods
Besides biology, Hoffman’s images also recall stringed musical instruments – banjos and sitars and Japanese samisen, making them more approachable and less apocalyptic.
At its best, his work is deeply beautiful. A wood piece titled “Bittersweet,” carved from Oregon white oak, looks like a graceful electric guitar with strange, living protuberances growing from its neck.
A larger sculpture, “Stage of Life,” resembles an altar piece, with what could be angels flying across the top over three vertical musical forms.
The prints – all monotypes – are well displayed in the White Lotus show, grouped in settings of two or three images that echo one another with their repeated vertical forms. Each piece in the show is displayed alongside a bit of Hoffman’s haiku.
Little known here as an artist, Hoffman teaches art at Western Oregon University in Monmouth, where he has twice served as head of the art department. His work has been exhibited around the Northwest and, last year, in Japan.
His is an excellent show and a nice companion piece to the Toyonaga show at the JSMA. Go see them both.
Kim Hoffman
Sculpture, Prints and Poems from the Heartfelt Series
White Lotus Gallery
767 Willamette Street
Through November 11