Pop Zen and a Fort with The Vision at The Bakery in Barrio. Fear not, folks, this isn’t 2012. What may sound like an apocalyptic nursery tale was in fact Set & Drift’s latest collaborative event, presenting the work of Keikichi Honna and Wes Bruce, and including a performance by The Vision of a Dying World, hosted at The Bakery on April 3. This event marked The Bakery's gallery debut.

"Liquidation Sale" was a diverse presentation, showcasing Honna's Junctique Collection of hammers and wrenches, as well as his Pop Zen paintings of pixilated portraits. Although these paintings, benign in subject matter (gummy bears, a little girl, a woman, a fly, etc) are accessible at first glance, their revelation matures with evaluation. Upon entrance to the gallery, each picture floats on the wall’s white space like a blown-up newspaper page, void of context. A closer look shows a jumble of detailed circles and colors; only now indistinguishable with the original image.

In his Pop Zen Manifesto, of which he is Institute’s founder, Honna discusses the semiotics central to his work, musing on the function of language verses the fluidity of circumstance. “Even though recorded words or written texts do not change their physical appearances; their meaning always contains a certain amount of ambiguity, uncertainty, and undecidability. Those fuzzy boundaries of words depend on each individual's experiences, as such each word brings me images and concepts which are uniquely my own.” Exploring those “fuzzy boundaries”, Honna’s paintings succeed in evoking questions of worth, craft, and identity—and whose answers fluctuate with each gallery lap or closer examination.

In addition, San Diego’s favorite lost boy, Wes Bruce, built a Live-in-Able Fort for the show, complete with secret nooks, a typewriter, and poetry on cassette. Raw wood wallpapered with ancient notes, photographs, and knickknacks galore—the Fort was a potent mix of freedom and enclosure, imagination and nostalgia. A fine addition to Bruce’s series of all-enveloping installations, the Fort was a time machine, transporting all knee-hugging dwellers into the intimate safety and endless possibilities of childhood.


 

Photos by Carly Ealey

More photos from Carly's Flikr can be found here.