Sweet to Remember

Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to present Sweet to Remember, a two-artist exhibition by NYC-based Keya Tama and Los Angeles-based artist Madeleine Tonzi. The presentation is Tama’s inaugural exhibition at the gallery and Tonzi’s third exhibition at Hashimoto Contemporary. Keya Tama’s paintings tell stories of archetypal heroes. Seamlessly blending his painting practice with tapestries and ceramics, his work expands into abstracted modern folktales. Utilizing a language made of ancient and contemporary motifs, people, and artifacts, he unites a surreal world with personal allegories. Geometric in composition and limited in palette, refined shapes converge with stylized illustrative figures, allowing the viewer to experience a dreamlike homage to a world painted over by time. Tonzi’s work examines the relationships between memory, place and the environment, focusing on her experience in an ever changing landscape impacted by climate change and the passage of time. A common thread throughout her work is the concept of solastalgia, a term coined by Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher, who describes the emotional and existential distress caused by environmental change. Her imagery is sourced from memory and personal experiences. Mediated by the distortion of those memories over time, her use of hard edges, soft color palettes, and bold organic and architectural forms reveal subtle tensions and contradictions between the built and natural world, while honoring the ephemeral state of time and memory. Tonzi’s quiet compositions are rhythmic yet orderly and balanced, inviting the viewer to consider their own contradictions and relationship to the land and their environments in context to the existential crisis we find ourselves in. For the exhibition, Keya Tama and Madeleine Tonzi have collaborated on three original works, a large scale canvas as well as two sheep wool rugs. Blending their palettes and iconography, Tama and Tonzi have built a bridge between their practice, resulting in a new seamless dialogue. Keya Tama is a South African artist based in New York City. Inspired by pastel color palettes, pattern, and symbolism, Keya Tama has been a practicing artist and muralist since the age of thirteen. His style can be describe as ancient contemporary minimalism; by processing and refining images into minimalistic forms while maintaining their essence, his works aim to reunite old and new through contrasting yet unified iconography. The artist uses visuality from the storehouse of art history and references and remixes their recurring themes to create stark contrasts and discover unexpected commonalities which produce unusual, arresting, yet strangely familiar works. Working primarily in acrylics to create his pieces, there is a strong graphic feel to each piece. Across the artist’s practice, there are recurring themes of contrasting ancient and contemporary iconography, family and community, mono-myths, and minimalism. Los Angeles-based artist Madeleine Tonzi, is a painter and muralist. Her work is focused on capturing the essence of ephemeral moments, and is a reflection of her investigation into memory and place and the relationships we form with the various environments we experience. Born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, her aesthetic inescapably echos her time spent in the high desert landscape, and simultaneously gives way to her experiences traveling and living in California. Finding both solace and discomfort in the places that she goes, Madeleine creates vivid abstract representational landscapes, both organic and architectural, utilizing a distinct visual language in order to emote what can not always be put into words as we move through time and space.