Exhibit lets artist reflect on life of creativity
New Hamburg’s Gloria Kagawa will display artwork at Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre
NEW HAMBURG — Inside Gloria Kagawa’s New Hamburg art studio, you’ll find a scale mock-up of a 2,500-square-foot art gallery in Toronto.
Kagawa isn’t planning a high-stakes art heist, however. The diorama of the mainfloor gallery inside the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre is helping the artist organize and plan for her upcoming two-month exhibition in that space that launches Aug. 18.
“It’s kind of fun,” she said with a laugh. “It’s like a big board game.”
The exhibition, a retrospection on the artist’s 35-year career, is titled “Gate: ink and paint,” and runs to Oct. 24.
For more than three decades, Kagawa has created original pieces of artwork for sale and exhibition around the world. About 60 pieces will be on display — and it hasn’t been easy sorting through her life’s work and
deciding which pieces will make the cut.
“There has been a lot of digging around and looking through my art, and I’ve realized I’ve done a large amount of work,” said the 70-year-old artist, a third-generation Japanese-American who moved from the United States to Toronto in 1968, and arrived in Kitchener three years later.
The number of pieces in her collection is in the hundreds, she said, and that doesn’t include the hundreds of works she’s sold over the years.
“I look around in amazement and think, ‘How did I do all that?’”
By combining colours, textures, shapes and sometimes architectural elements into her art, she has created a diverse body of artwork that ranges from specific to abstract.
Kagawa uses oil and waterbased inks on rag paper and fine Japanese papers, and her mixedmedia work includes painting, drawing, photography and printmaking. Her artistic themes include celebration, socio-political commentary, and human and environmental struggles.
She has also explored her Japanese heritage by studying calligraphy with Waterloo-based artist Noriko Maeda, and her work has been shown in exhibitions in Canada, Brazil, Poland, Holland, Taiwan, the U.S. and Japan. She was voted Waterloo Region’s Visual Artist of the Year in 2011.
The Toronto show at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre gallery, at 6 Garamond Court, will be her first solo exhibition.
“It’s such a huge honour,” said Kagawa, who was born and raised in Colorado and moved to Alabama as a child. It’s also her first major art show since a 2007 exhibition at the Button Factory in Waterloo, and “the biggest show I’ve ever had,” she said.
Collecting artwork for the show has forced Kagawa to look back on her career and her upbringing in the U.S., and she said her childhood experiences are reflected in her work. Growing up a Japanese-American in Colorado and Alabama during the 1950s and ’60s often meant she was an outsider who experienced racism and bigotry.
“The people in my work are all silhouettes, and most of them look isolated or alone, even if they’re in a group,” she said.
In 1968, Kagawa moved to Toronto as an objector to the Vietnam War. “It was just amazing. It was so safe and friendly, it was wonderful.”
She moved to Kitchener in 1971, then New Hamburg in 1978. She overcame an abusive relationship with her husband and the abduction of one of her sons to graduate from the University of Waterloo’s fine arts honours program in 1982.
Thematically, her work often investigates human relationships with their surroundings. Her intent is to reveal the human condition and humanity’s physical and emotional states by bringing social issues to light through depictions of the environment and architectural structures, such as homes, buildings and shelters.
Kagawa also overcome a health scare last year when she had major heart surgery in May to repair an aortic aneurysm and replace two valves.
“I was lucky,” she said.
The show runs from Aug. 18 to Oct. 24 at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto, with the opening reception scheduled for Sept. 9 from 2 to 4 p.m. For more information, visit www.jccc.on.ca or www.gloriakagawa.com.