Oppression and Transcendence [microform] : the Iconography of Kazuo Nakamura's Grids

Résumé du livre

This thesis claims and demonstrates that the conceptual and graphic key to an understanding and appreciation of the art of Kazuo Nakamura is the simple horizontal and vertical grid of equal units. Beginning with his informal study of one-point Renaissance perspective at about the age of thirteen, this study traces Nakamura's exposure to several aspects of the grid, from a tool of traditional perspective, to a tool of accuracy in rendering, to an emblem of modernism, to a graphic tool of contemporary scientific research and representation, and finally to its association with the symbolism of yearning associated with the "view through the window" theme of German Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. With references to the development of his artistic and philosophic goals being a result and reflection of his life experience beginning at age sixteen with the destruction of his Japanese-Canadian community, this thesis maintains that the trauma of Nakamura's teenage years was the springboard of his later projects in which he worked toward a synthesis of the rationalism of scientific research with a contemplative aesthetic. Nakamura's life-long research project, established during the years of enforced solitude and isolation in the forests of the British Columbia interior, was his search for a sense of place from which he could no longer be exiled. Employing the grid as the armature of his research, Nakamura reduced the momentary and superficial appearances of nature to its hidden mathematical structures. The culmination of his research was the conversion of the grid as a metaphor of oppression and confinement to one of escape and transcendence. Nakamura's path through the barrier of the grid parallels and personalises the history of science, the history of perception, the history of the symbolism of the grid from the Renaissance to Modernism and the history of Nakamura's long project to discover a personal sense of place.