Essay By Matthew McAuley
The man sleeps odd hours and has three Pomeranians. Artists are crazy, even still in 2024, when the world feels frozen in an ice cube of predictable profanity. Violently beige as the internet is the street. He is a patron of multiple generations of downtown New York. He hosts you in his apartment and paints still lifes when you pass out. He has photographed you. He has photographed a thousand construction sites. He has an eye for the aorta and the details of a scene. Scrapes on the wall from an angry mover humping a couch, the beauty in a beat-red drunk face drowned in a flash. He fills a clip art pear with juice and InDesigns on a raw canvas with the casual flair of a long-dead Dutchman. This is all before you get to the depths of the ideas: the history, the odes to family, and other artists. Nishimoto’s art can be as sweetly superficial or nourishingly deep as your cup can hold. This show does not demand that you be familiar with the minutia of references, inside jokes that much of contemporary art assumes, but it's there if you want it. It's there if you wish to climb in and find it. He will tell you.
From a conversation with the artist-
“it was during the pandemic that I started making these little still lifes through the windows or portals of the construction holes. Quiet, small-scaled painterly studies. This was never done on purpose, but after the pandemic, the still lifes jumped out of the portals larger than life.”
“...and you know I’ve been documenting the construction holes with photography for as long as I’ve been taking photos with a single point-and-shoot film camera, so that’s probably over 12 years. I’ve explored them figuratively, abstractly, and perhaps in many different ways. “
“..one more thought beyond all of that is that I realized after a while that my photography does inform my painting quite a bit. When I look at my photographs on my laptop, sometimes they are similar to the history of my works.”
Steve Nishimoto presents work in three motifs: The Apple, The Pear, and The American.
A series of abstract scuffed hallways and another framed by the diamond-shaped windows of the ubiquitous New York City work site continue his exploration of the city's natural life inspired by the Ashcan School, supplemented with more contemporary references to Raymond Saunders's construction wall pieces.
A second group consists of still-life fruits, some on a massive scale, suspended on raw canvas backgrounds. Here, he flashes his skill as a painter and his layered sense of humor. The fruit is so well rendered it almost jumps off the wall. Still, the decision to place it in a blank space owes to the deliberate choice to paint from photos purchased online, blurring the line between the honored tradition of still-life painting and the utilitarian commercialism of stock photography.
Nishimoto addresses his heritage broadly as a Japanese American and directly as the great-grandson of a landscape painter, C.T. Hibino, whose portrait was taken by American photographer Ansel Adams at the Manzanar, California internment camp. He was deemed Artist of Japan by the Emperor of Japan. Again, he consciously paints from purchased stock imagery, this time of the same mountains his great-grandfather had painted from life. The mountain landscapes are overlain with the pointed phrase, “I AM AN AMERICAN,” taken from signage displayed in the shop windows of Japanese Americans at the outset of World War Two in the face of violent racism and mass internment in prison camps in the western United States.
Finally, he merges elements of all three motifs in landscapes with floating apples. The fruit from the still life is flown in to evoke American mythologies (apple pie, Johnny Appleseed) as it hovers spectrally within verdant valleys, straight from the Hudson River School painters. Against the backdrop of one of the first uniquely American painting traditions, the apple stands in for the text from the mountain landscapes to affirm the artist’s deep-rooted Americanness.