"Japanese Film and Southern California Art Meet In a Grove" by Cleo Spencer
Standing in the center of the Kirsten Everberg exhibitionIn a Grove at the Pomona College Museum of Art, you begin to feel as if you have fallen into another realm. On all four walls of the small gallery space, large paintings of a grayish forest lock you into their mysterious luminosity. Step closer, and you discover that all those delicate leaves and branches are, in actuality, intertwining drops, rivers, and puddles of enamel.
Everberg’s unusual technique, in which she pours enamel onto prepared horizontal panels, draws attention to the nature of perception, since the painting can be viewed both as a scene and as an abstraction. Throughout her body of work, Everberg has engaged with such questions of perception, subjectivity, and memory. In this particular collection, she explored these themes through a film that deals with similar concerns: Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon.