Two shows open Thursday during Creative Cocktail Hour at Real Art Ways

Real Art Ways
56 Arbor St., Hartford, (860) 232-1006
Tadashi Moriyama: Planetalgia
William Villalongo: Fierce!
Apr. 18—Jul. 4, 2013.
Opening reception during Creative Cocktail Hour: Thurs., Apr. 18, 6—8 p.m. Admission is $10/$5 Real Art Ways members.

Press release from Real Art Ways

The galleries at Real Art Ways will hold entirely new art for the next Creative Cocktail Hour on Thurs., Apr. 18, from 6-10 p.m. Opening receptions for Planetalgia by StepUp 2012 selectee Tadashi Moriyama and Fierce! by William Villalongo are the same night from 6—8 p.m. Admission is $10/$5 for Real Art Ways members.

Moriyama's Planetalgia is an accumulation of paintings, sculptures, performance, and animation, inspired by concepts from the book Lunartix by Seigou Matsuoka. Matsuoka coins the term "Planetary Nostalgia" as a sweet and bitter sentiment. Loosely translated, he writes, "Since we cannot escape from the earth, we feel despair for our fate and leave our destination on the unreachable but intimate moon, and yearn for it endlessly." This notion shapes the visual and conceptual language of the exhibition.

Tadashi Moriyama: "Planetalgia"

Tadashi Moriyama was born and raised in Japan, moving to the United States in 2001 at the age of 21. He received his BA in 2003 from the Tyler School of Art and his MFA in 2006 from the University of Pennsylvania. Moriyama's work has exhibited internationally and across the United States. Recent solo and group shows include Johansson Projects, San Francisco; Jonathan Ferrara, NewOrleans; Artiscope, Belgium; Artprojx cinema Volta art fair, New York.

Moriyama lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, using a variety of media, miniature drawing, sculpture and animation to create a form of unique narrative. He draws extensively on his own experience as a metropolitan resident, a Tokyo-raised New Yorker.

The term "Fierce!" in American vernacular language has a double meaning, which speaks to feminine beauty as a representation of strength and authority. Beauty and power are fused together to express an attitude that is antithetical to the common notions of both ideas. This exhibition brings together a selection of Villalongo's recent works subverting themes found in Primitivism, a Western art movement that borrows visual forms from non-Western or prehistoric peoples. Through Villalongo's velvety, looking-glass paintings and drawings, the artist questions an exotic gaze directed toward "otherness" by inverting the genre of Modern Abstract painting. A clan of lake dwelling maidens pull models of Western art radically out of context, reconsidering standards of Western beauty and the possible intersections of art and survival.

William Villalongo: "Fierce!"

William Villalongo lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He was born in 1975 in Hollywood, FL and raised in the town of Bridgeton, NJ. Villalongo is the recipient of the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptor's Grant. His work is included in several notable collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Princeton University Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in Art In America, The New Yorker and The New York Times. Villalongo is currently represented by the Susan Inglett Gallery in New York, and PEVETO Fine Art in Houston.