Review  By  Thomas Cunniff

At first glance, there is a healthy dose of surrealism in Mieko Hara’s new series of paintings entitled “Aston,” and that’s not a bad thing.  Surrealism has never really ceased being relevant, in part because it has always located its sense of the real, as it were---that of the “marvelous” or visionary real---in an awakened present. Hara achieves this effect through a superb commingling of structural intellectualism  and  lush sensuality.
 
Her images, which are entirely abstract, have the startling effect of the camouflage of nature, for example that of tropical flora, or the figuration of ancient landscapes, moons, planets, the play of distances in darkness and light.  In her new work, Hara has ingeniously cut circles out of an earlier series whose themes were evocative of the emulsive montage of film and placed them, like floating orbs or magnifying droplets of water, against a shimmering curtain of a single similar image.  In other words, what we are seeing is the same abstracted image, reduced and concentrated in scale and floating before our eyes as miniature worlds within worlds that create a multiplicity of seeing, a natural vision of hyper-reality.

It is a stunning formal achievement, born out of the simple procedure of recycling and repetition, but one that is also nonetheless readily available to the quotidian eye.  Why?   Perhaps because we’ve become accustomed to the fragmented images of our technological media, but also because this multiple and simultaneous capability grants heightened power to seeing.  It is the way that the world might see itself, it is the way that seeing itself is predicated on: that if there is a world to be visually apprehended then that world must exist in the mind’s eye, in the eye of the imaginal, a world that is far away/so close, floating in this dream of life. Mieko Hara has summoned it.

Thomas Cunniff  is a Bay Area writer.