Richard T. Walker

Katsutoshi Yuasa

Kala Fellowships are awarded annually to eight innovative artists working in printmaking, photography, book arts, installation, video and digital media. Fellowship artists are selected from a competitive field of applicants from the United States, South America, Europe, Africa, Australia and Asia. Recipient artists receive a financial award and up to six-months residency at Kala’s studio facility followed by an exhibition of their new work. The Kala Gallery is proud to present the first of our four-part exhibition series, Residency Projects, featuring work by our 2007-2008 Fellowship artists.

Spoken dialogue, text and original music compositions culminate in Richard T. Walker’s work to construct video and photography that investigates complex relationships between language, the environment and ourselves. In using a contemporary meditation on Romantic landscape and the Romantic individual Walker visually constructs and reveals inherent failures in language that highlight fickle inconsistencies within the current human condition. Using the experience of our environment as metaphor, these inconsistencies are used as a critical tool to reveal a point of confrontation between innate desire, cultural interpretation and reality. He will be presenting his latest work titled sometimes I like you more than othertimes, a two screen video installation. Richard received his MFA degree from Goldsmith’s College in London. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions, screenings and performances throughout England, Germany, Spain and Japan.

Tokyo-based artist Katsutoshi Yuasa creates large-scale woodcut prints based on his photographs. The photographs are a key element of the printmaking process as Yuasa records elements of his daily life. The photographic process also enables the artist to more fully engage in his wide-ranging world travels. A selection of these photographs serves as the basis for his dramatic, monochromatic woodcut prints that are laboriously carved by hand using a traditional Japanese knife. Each woodblock is then printed by entirely by hand using a baren, as opposed to a press. For his exhibition at Kala, Yuasa’s most recent woodblock print series is based on photographs he has taken in the Bay Area. Katsutoshi received his MA in Fine Arts/Printmaking from the Royal College of Art in London. His work has been presented in many solo exhibitions including galleries in Tokyo, New York, Edinburgh and Leipzig. The Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science recently awarded Katsutoshi an artist’s residency in Amsterdam.

There will be an Artists’ Talk in the gallery with Richard T. Walker and Katsutoshi Yuasa on Tuesday, July 29 at 7:00pm. The talk is free and open to the public.

The next presentation in our Residency Projects exhibition series will open on September24 with new works by Kala Fellowship artists Adriane Colburn, Taraneh Hemami and Leslie Shows.

Kala Art Institute location:
1060 Heinz Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94710 (510) 549-2977

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday - Friday, Noon - 5:30pm; Saturday, Noon - 4:30pm

Exhibitions are free and open to the public.