Personal Mythologies: Earlier, Recent and Future Acquisitions
on view from January 21 - March 13

Personal Mythologies presents works from the collection of The Contemporary Museum that have never, or rarely, been shown publicly in Honolulu, and which complement the presentation of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation Gift. The exhibition includes painting, photography, sculpture, and installation, bringing together a selection of contemporary artists and their forbears who function within the long shadow cast by the legacy of Joseph Cornell. Works in the exhibition transport us to fictional realms where dreams and fantasies come alive and where idiosyncratic narratives present us with mysterious situations and near-mythical beings. From 1960 to the present, works by John Ahearn, Joseph Biel, Enrique Mart’nez Celaya, Douglas Gordon, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Teun Hocks, Eiko Hosoe, JosŽ Bedia, Aya Kawaguchi, Joseph Kosuth, Tom Marioni, Yasumasa Morimura, Frank Moore, Nic Nicosia, Catherine Opie, Dennis Oppenheim, Gary Simmons, Stephanie Syjuco, and Jeff Wall reveal different approaches to the use of imagery, text, and subject matter as a means of moving from day-to-day reality to parallel realms situated within the artistic imagination.

Cornell's flair for invention and improvisation with commonplace materials and objects is called to mind by Marioni's glass fronted box containing a personnage created with found objects, while Biel and Moore summon the imagination of Cornell with their fanciful dreamlike imagery. Cornell's attraction to dolls and other toys (including plastic lobsters) is evoked by a mechanized, dancing marionette by Oppenheim as well his large installation of oversized aloha shirts covered with fake lobsters and other plastic novelties. Syjuco's illustrations of electronic hardware-cum-botanical specimens recall Cornell's penchant for pseudo-scientific flights of imagination, while figurative works by JosŽ Bedia and Enrique Mart’nez Celaya suggest the mythological gods and goddesses that often populate Cornell's world. Opie's portrait of the performance artist Jerome Caja in drag, and Morimura's self-portrait as Marilyn Monroe, are reminders of Cornell's many tributes to glamorous film goddesses, while Gordon's double self-portrait reveals a dark, mythic presence lurking beneath the surface of the skin. Eiko Hosoe's photograph from his Man and Woman series recall Cornell's obsession with the classical ballet and works by Ahearn, Hancock, Hocks, Nicosia, and Wall summon Cornell through the construction of personal, impenetrable narratives and explorations of secret desires and compulsions. Kawaguchi, Kosuth and Simmons take a more reflective, poetic approach to explore the indistinct recesses between the visible and unseen, the physical and metaphysical, and imagination and reality. Kawaguchi, a young Japanese artist who is based in Honolulu, investigates the relationship between the "seen" and the "scene" in her observation of nature and its vicissitudes. Her site specific installation created especially for Personal Mythologies plays off of the square window panes that look out onto the museum's Lawrence Newbold Brown Japanese garden. In nine reverse-glass paintings installed across from corresponding panes, Kawaguchi frames meticulously observed aspects of the garden revealing the very personal, subjective choices we all make in the act of looking. Echoing Cornell's ability to construct miniature worlds behind glass-fronted boxes, Kawaguchi's installation presents a fictional world drawn from the overlooked aspects of everyday life.