Los Angeles artist Joseph Shuldiner was born into a creative family. His grandfather was a Depression-era visionary painter, and his aunt, Bella Lewitzky was an important figure in the development of American Modern Dance. For Shuldiner, creativity is a way of seeing – a process in which the visual environment is constantly rediscovered and reinterpreted.

“The interplay between natural and manmade is a theme that has informed my work with increasing frequency over the past several years, one that has drawn inspiration from my long-held fascination with Japanese culture,” Shuldiner says of the work he is exhibiting at the Center. “In this series, I have taken the visual motif of the grid as my point of departure, both for its centrality to my aesthetic and its essential role in traditional Japanese architecture. Similar in size and shape to the “kanban,” or signboards found outside shops in old Japan, these pieces are also employed as semiotic devices that, like a sign, use visual information to suggest content. Ultimately, it is the very unlikelihood of something as starkly artificial as the grid existing at all that makes it so compelling a device through which to view our relationship with the natural world, its regularity contrasting so sharply with the essentially uncontainable, ungovernable qualities of our environment. If these kanban do carry an encoded message within them, it is that we cannot possibly know one without the other.”  

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Joseph Shuldiner at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts View Joseph Shuldiner interview.

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