Archive Project 27: Kaz Oshiro

Catalogue Essay | Images from the Exhibition Kaz Oshiro Home Page | Fall 2005 Archive

The Project Series
Project 27: Kaz Oshiro

Kaz Oshiro transforms paint and canvas into domestic and utilitarian objects that blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture, illusion and function. They appear to be exact replicas of appliances, cabinetry, or electronics, but are painstakingly made with a painter’s traditional tools of oil and canvas, supplemented with bondo, a material car refinishers commonly use. Playing with artifice and illusion, Oshiro presents a meticulous three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface, making clear the underlying structure of the illusion by revealing the stretcher-bar and canvas of the painting.

Oshiro’s hybrid objects deconstruct the traditions and heritage of modern art—in particular, painting and pop art—and confront the illusions and myths of popular culture here, in Southern California. With a vivid pop sensibility, Oshiro’s seemingly mundane objects reference the history of late twentieth-century art—Minimalist sculpture, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, and California Finish Fetish—through the stuff of popular culture—music, furniture design and fabrication, and car culture.

In earlier work—replications of Marshall and Peavey amplifiers, dorm refrigerators, microwave ovens, and trash cans ornamented with stickers and stains—Oshiro focused on music and popular culture, where his everyday objects told stories of specific sub-cultures in the music and art worlds, through combinations of appliance and adornment, His newer work—replications of wall cabinets, a full-scale kitchen, and, here, washers and dryers—engages issues of domesticity, design, architecture, and their relationships to the commodities of popular culture and private life.

Kaz Oshiro’s exhibition is the twenty-seventh in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of focused exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator