Sharing Cultures | Creating Community Opens at Descanso Gardens

The Japanese Garden in Descanso Gardens celebrated it 50th anniversary with the unveiling of a new bridge to the tea house and an exhibition in the Sturt Haaga Gallery. Sharing Cultures | Creating Community combines history and contemporary art to explore the role and influence of Japanese Gardens.

The three-part exhibition focuses on the the history of the Japanese Garden, the context of the garden among Japanese-style gardens in the United States and the influence Japanese-style gardens have had on contemporary artists.

The historical aspects of the exhibition show how the garden brings people together and allows them to share the experience of nature. Descanso’s tea room has been a gathering place for Los Angeles’ elite as well as an important place for cultural exchange among the Japanese community and those curious about Japanese culture.

The new works show the beauty of restraint and draw inspiration from the stylized expressions of nature present in Japanese Gardens. These artworks include paintings and mixed media work created by living artists.

One prominent piece is Internal Dialog by Mineko Grimmer. Good art strikes you – it grabs your attention and doesn’t relent. Grimmer’s thought-provoking mixed media installation leaves the viewer mesmerized. It features a frozen pyramid of pebbles suspended above a wooden box crisscrossed with protruding bamboo sticks and musical instrument strings situated in a square pool of water with black edges.

The sound sculpture brings awareness to geometric shapes, from the clean simplicity of squares to the austere lines of the bamboo and strings to circles carved into the box and the inverted pyramid suspended above, and mimics the precise lines and angles found in many Japanese gardens. Her muted color palette of natural wood tones, bamboo, sandy pebbles and a black base is reminiscent of the neutral colors found in Japanese architecture.

As time passes, the pebbles fall into the box creating melodiously erratic music. The different materials the pebble encounters as it falls into the pool of water creates different sound patterns as the suspended pyramid gently sways to the Earth’s gravity. Grimmer’s sound sculpture plays with the idea of restraint and has meditative aspect, both qualities that are inherent in a traditional Japanese garden.

Her sculpture also adds an element of uncertainty and plays with the notion of time – just as the garden is a living, evolving work of art, Internal Dialog is subject to the passage of time and changes upon each viewing.

Experience nature and the works it inspires at Descanso Gardens’ Sturt Haaga Gallery. Sharing Culture | Creating Community will be on view from October 15, 2016 until January 29, 2017.

Descanso Gardens is located at 1418 Descanso Drive, La Canada Flintridge. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day except Monday, when the Gallery is closed. Admission to the Sturt Haaga Gallery is free with Gardens admission: $9 for adults; $6 for seniors and students with a school I.D.; $4 for children 5 to 12, and free for age 4 and younger. Visit www.descansogardens.org for more information.