Heather Kanazawa's Investigations of Life

Heather Kanazawa does not paint portraits, landscapes or still lifes,  but memories. Her predominantly abstract works layer oil paint and wax,  supplemented with bits of vintage fabric, in spindly, hazy compositions  that spatter and wend across canvas: highlight reels of color and  movement. Investigations of Life, the collection of recollections  currently installed at BoxHeart Gallery, specifically documents travel  remembrance, the sights and sounds and scents of time recently spent in  Japan. The Pittsburgh-born, New York-based artist has placed particular  emphasis on commemorating interactions with the natural world,  suggesting tree branches, mountains, leaves and water; that world’s  relationship with the man-made that surrounds and intersects with it;  and how both the organic and the synthetic are perceived when filtered  through the practice of Zen.

In a description of her work, Kanazawa says that she has total recall  of her experiences. The memories she summons during the creative  process, captured through rigorous attention that anticipates the need  to someday reference them, are pitch-perfect and fully realized, free of  blanks or blurs and solid as concrete. But what her work can evoke for  the viewer is a different kind of memory translated to imagery — not the  kind we can stand before and observe with clarity and precision, but  the kind that flits elusively around the edges, seemingly solid when  hovering in the periphery, ethereal and dissolving when we try to  contain it head-on. We can sense and almost pinpoint something  representational lying in wait within the gauze of the abstract. We can  almost bring it into focus, but we just fall short.  

What we can perceive in Kanazawa’s works, in this gathering of a  dozen-and-a-half pieces, is vibrant and exquisite. Form and hue join in  motion steady as a wave or unpredictable as an avalanche, conjuring  environments here vast and unstoppable, there minute and contained.  Color mottles and blotches, reaches out gently like delicate tendrils or  pushes forward in explosion. Every surface pulsates with life,  overflowing with movement and booming with sound, no matter how we look  at it, and we’ll be inspired to examine every inch as thoroughly as we  can.  

While the details may confound and puzzle our eyes, it’s evident  they’re crystalline in Kanazawa’s mind; that which remains tenuous makes  what we regard electrifying, deepening something simply beautiful with  the thrill of seeking what is hidden.