Yozo Suzuki
For Yozo Suzuki, art transcends the visual and packs the greatest punch on a deeper, introspective level. “The art that moves me tends to have an intangible energetic resonance,” he says. “If I can feel it, then the genre and context of the work becomes somewhat circumstantial.” Since his arrival in the City Different in 1993 to study art at the College of Santa Fe, the Kansas City–born Suzuki, 38, has gone on to create works in various mediums that are reflections on modern-day concerns. “I like to work with media that is relevant to and consistent with the concept of the work,” he says. A case in point is an ongoing, largescale, mixed-media project (formerly at Linda Durham Contemporary Art) called Personal Identification Artifact. Begun in 2006 (with no firm end-date in mind), it’s an exploration of identity—a contemporary take on the classical portrait. What defines today’s portrait, however, are DNA samples, fingerprints, X-ray images, bank statements. “Although most of us are aware of this on some level,” says Suzuki, “I don’t think we would generally think of ourselves as a database.” The imagery in this project, he adds, is taken from publically available sources. “I superimpose the data over the image of a person. It’s a collection of information that’s used to identify each of us, but it’s also a picture of all of us. The interesting part is the way our humanity peeks through the analytical soup of data we use to identify each other.” —AH
Yozo Suzuki, installation view of Gambit: An Opening Move mixed media, 12 x 10 x 4'
Gena Fowler
Gena Fowler is the Jenny Holzer of clay. Known to visitors of Purple Sage for her witty dog bowls and at Santa Fe Clay for her equally poetic coffee cups, Fowler, 39, imprints all her clay creations—brightly glazed, brightly colored, seemingly happy—with aphorisms, puns, and twists galore. Born in Denver but raised since age seven in Santa Fe, when her CPA parents relocated, Fowler has also made life-size figures—George Segal people as imagined by Alice Neel (one of Fowler’s inspirations). But her true genius comes through in what she calls her “products,” Wacky Pack-like pieces such as Social Skills, Oil of Okay, and Comment Cleanser. As gifted and uninhibited as Red Grooms, Fowler likes the malleability of clay, the fact that she can erase and change things with it quickly. Working with clay—creating her so-called products especially—that’s her therapy. “If I have a bad feeling, I make Gena Fowler, Social Skills, porcelain, 6 x 7 x 4" these things in order to crawl out of it and to laugh at it,” says Fowler, who has self-therapized her way through the death of one brother and a falling out with the other. “I really like it when somebody sees one of my products and says, I need that, too.”—Devon Jackson june/july 2011
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