ROMAN AND WILLIAMS GUILD GALLERY PRESENTS
ART AND PURPOSE:
WORKS BY NINE ARTISTS

With Art and Purpose, RW Guild Gallery celebrates the art and beauty of everyday things. Featuring the work of nine makers–Kenta Anzai, Ludmilla Balkis, Akiko Hirai, Rick Hintze, Yoshimitsu Ishihara, Mirjam De Nijs, Hitoshi Morimoto, Maggie Wells, and Casey Zablocki—the presentation considers the way in which functional necessities tell stories and bear poignant weight in our daily lives. 

The pieces by these artists, who work in media ranging from ceramic to stone, demonstrate the way furniture, sculptures, and vessels communicate narratives about our modes and aspirations for the way we desire to inhabit our lives. Aesthetic expression is not only visual wonder we feel through our consciousness, but also the way we physically interact with our spaces and belongings. Through the use and arrangement of purposeful things we create a rhythm to our regular habits that gives history and grounding to our rituals and encounters with the tangible world.

Through this performance, objects are endowed with great emotional presence. Memories and energies are formed through the textures and gestures that we intuit through our senses. Indeed, the nine global artists featured in Art and Purpose all in their own ways question the archetype of form and bodily interaction to innovate new experiences, building upon the craft and spirit of traditions past. The result is a synergy and unexpected delight between items with the same utility from diverse temporal and geographic boundaries.

Art and Purpose embraces the idea that to exist in a functional environment is to live pleasurably, with our needs, desires, and emotional life cared for profoundly.