Inside Art with Michael Rose: Chazan Gallery Returns with Drawings and Prints

Inside Art with Michael Rose: Chazan Gallery Returns with Drawings and Prints

In a place like Rhode Island, some of the best visual art can be found in surprising spaces. For instance, many of the finest exhibitions of contemporary art in the state have for years taken place in a modest gallery tucked away on the second floor of the library at the Wheeler School on Providence’s East Side. Founded in 1969 and known as the Chazan Gallery since 2007, the space has long been renowned for its curatorial muscle. Though temporarily closed by the pandemic, Chazan Gallery is now reopened to the public and its premier exhibition is a reminder of what the community was missing during its absence. Featuring works by Yizhak Elyashiv and Ken Horii, the gallery’s current show is up through October 6 and it is a stunner.

During its hiatus, the Chazan Gallery was repurposed by Wheeler as an ad hoc classroom. The private school maintained in-person education throughout the pandemic, and its upper school students learned in the space which was formerly reserved for exhibitions. Of the gallery’s reopening, Chazan Gallery Director Liz Kilduff said, “After a long break we are very excited to re-engage with the community through art. The Wheeler School has supported the gallery since its inception and is eager to continue this connection.”

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With its return, the venue’s exhibition programming is beginning where it left off. Yizhak Elyashiv and Ken Horii were originally slated to exhibit a year ago, and although their show was deferred the final result is well worth the wait.

 

 

Both Elyashiv and Horii are academically-minded artists. Elyashiv divides his teaching time between the faculties of Rhode Island College and the Rhode Island School of Design. Horii served, until his retirement in 2020, as a much-lauded professor in the Spatial Dynamics in the Experimental and Foundation Studies Division at RISD. For a decade he headed the division, which is responsible for some of the school’s most rigorous training. Besides their shared background as educators, the key tie binding artworks by Elyashiv and Horii is their astounding precision. Both artists make images that deserve close attention.

At the recent opening of their exhibition in the intimate and concrete-ceilinged Chazan Gallery, masked guests mingled amidst exciting prints and drawings by two master craftsmen.

Born in Jerusalem, Yizhak Elyashiv began his tenure at RIC not long after earning his MFA from RISD in the early 90’s. He has also taught at his alma mater since 2001. A printmaker, his work has been shown widely and in venues ranging from the Brooklyn Museum to Harvard. Although based in Providence, Elyashiv has also worked in County Mayo, Ireland and the Irish landscape has provided inspiration for this recent work.

 

 

In a tight collection of Elyashiv’s images, the theme of mapping or triangulation comes across in ways that are at turns subliminal and explicit. Cloudlike forms and vanishing points are equally at home alongside more gestural and suggestive visual notations.

Descriptive lines define much of the aesthetic connection between these co-exhibitors. Lines that denote space, or depth, or planar realities in Elyashiv’s work are a counterpoint to Horii’s lines which employ an ostensibly familiar language of design. In his work, one might spot a spring, a screw, or a length of chain-link, but all is not as it appears.

Horii’s deeply layered drawings overlap varying forms of diagrammatic imagery. The typical static found in technical or architectural schematics is flouted in Horii’s artworks, which are presented on paper that subtly puckers and waves. In Horii’s wall-length drawings, the trustworthy vocabulary of a blueprint is often subverted, making for enticing opportunities to reexamine ideas about how to read an image.

Horii has enjoyed a fruitful career that has spanned more than four decades. A graduate of the esteemed Cooper Union in New York, Horii earned his MFA from the University of Wisconsin. Like Elyashiv, Horii has a lengthy resume, and one that includes a wide variety of exhibitions and teaching both in the United States and abroad.

 

 

When asked what sharing this recent body of work means to him, Horii replies, “I consider the work in this exhibit, drawing, and my focus is a means to refine and expand inquiries. In this way, I consider them generative, where, for instance, the dynamics implicit in knot diagrams can suggest dance choreography and sound composition. Ideas for one domain emerge from otherwise unrelated processes and procedures that build momentum for me in unexpected and exploratory ways.”

Horii and Elyashiv are fitting artists to reopen a venue of Chazan Gallery’s caliber and their expertly crafted artworks do not disappoint.

 

The Chazan Gallery is located at 228 Angell Street in Providence. It is open Mondays through Fridays from 3-6 pm each day, Saturdays from 11 am-4 pm, and Sundays from 12-4 pm. To learn more, visit www.chazangallery.org.