This article was originally published on July 13, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review

By Hugh Leeman
American artist, Chris Cosnowski's exhibition Shimmering Tale of still life oil paintings depicting toys and trophies at Dolby Chadwick gallery in San Francisco ask the viewer through the ancient coded language of the genre to decipher meaning in our era of postmodern myth-making, examine cultural narratives, and consider the absurdity of the present as we analyze images the artist spent countless hours producing by hand to realistically represent objects made in mere seconds through mass production. 

Shimmering Tale's use of still life contributes critical contemporary social commentary to a genre that has historically shown us that beneath the surface of material culture lies the opportunity to examine the values of the societies that consume the depicted objects. More than three millennia ago, the ancient Egyptians realistically depicted food on the tomb walls of the elite, believing that these images could become real in the afterlife. Two millennia ago, in ancient Pompeii, similar works reveal the society's sense of self. Although early 16th-century art critic Giorgio Vasari looked down upon the genre, by the late 16th century, Caravaggio brought it new life with his talents and inspired painters across Italy and Spain. Still life, however, is most often associated with the excesses, evolutions, and phenomenal social changes of the 17th-century Netherlands.

In 17th-century Dutch still life, one finds stunning representations of personal possessions, testament to commercial prowess, and the diversions of everyday life with an undercurrent that meditates on time. These works are best known for their flowers, whose ephemeral beauty speaks to life's transience while hinting at ethical dilemmas. In Shimmering Tale, Cosnowski's paintings perform a similar act, as his hyperrealistic representations speak to social concepts similar to those found in 17th-century Dutch still life, while humorously hinting at the dilemmas of today. 

Cosnowski's paintings conceptually connect deeply with the late 20th-century French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's writing. Baudrillard coined the postmodern term hyperreality to describe the growing avalanche of images in society and the yearning for distraction that had led to the creation of images less intent on showing us reality than on reshaping our perceptions of it. In Baudrillard's hyperreality, the genuine experience loses its luster to the shimmering appeal of the multiplicity of imagery. When real life becomes inferior to the images that depict it, society's affliction is most readily, albeit temporarily, treated through nostalgia. 

Cosnowski has expertly rendered and curated the still life as if photo shoots on social media aggrandizing mass-produced toys and trophies, nostalgic for a great American past that the artist hints is ambiguous at best. Nostalgia, his paintings suggest, is a natural reaction to postmodern skepticism triggered by the overwhelming amount of information and imagery. The objects rendered as plastic, gilded in cultural critique, speak to the power of myth to cast itself through multiplicity as if fact, and eventually into Baudrillard's hyperreality.
 
The great role of the artist is to expose cultural narratives that have become so normalized that we forget they are constructed. The stories encoded in Cosnowski's still life remind us of the stories a culture consumes to make meaning of its fears and project pride from its fantasies as if they were reality. Such a process is visualized in Shimmering Tale through the artist's depiction of plastic objects mass-produced from a mold.

In Old Mold (2024), the artist brings to life a pressed plastic trophy of a king in faux gold, backdropped by a gradient of lush purple, the color long associated with royalty, whose complement to the yellows in the gold trophy sets that painting alight. The artist's talent is evident in both technical acumen and concept. As the plastic has seeped out of the side of the mold, it has misformed the edges of the trophy king because the old mold has cast so many copies that its edges no longer align. Perhaps, the artists suggest through cipher, society is ready for a new mold to create a new ruler.

The exhibition's titular painting, Shimmering Tale (2025), shows us through the oversized trophy of a Cowboy on a bucking bronco the allure of America's great cultural tale: the tough guy who tames the wild west, bringing civilized culture and the freedoms of individualism through westward expansion to the teeming masses. The cowboy and his metallic luster, alas, are just plastic made to resemble gilded metal, confronting the viewer with the conceptual reality of identity construction through the mass production of artifice.

The cultural narrative extends beyond the American West and into the Western Hemisphere's most fertile field, feeding countless cultural values and inequalities, Eden. In Cosnowski's Eden (2025), a deer, a serpent, and a pink bunny meet in front of The Tree of Life, all elements cast in plastic, offering a postmodern interpretation of the classic. Here, the artist's humorous repackaging of the myth, once rich with ancient theological gravitas, becomes fit for our age of challenging universal truths.

The toy animals and tree in Eden exchange the story's sense of cosmic centrality for a modular group of accessories, as if Fisher-Price were commissioned to depict the book of Genesis. In doing so, moral tales become the commodified playthings of a consumer society's imagination. The deer is a proxy for the presence of Christ or longing for God, and the serpent for temptation, along with the tree itself, are deeply connected to the original telling of the tale. Yet, the pink bunny appears as if a glitch in the story, a result of society making a copy of a copy of the story for so long that it begins to mirror the artificiality of the bunny's pink plastic color. Cosnowski's pink toy bunny further evokes Jeff Koons' Inflatable Flower and Bunny (Tall White, Pink Bunny) (1979), a readymade from vinyl with mirrors, whose presence in the world of high art challenges cultural hierarchies and questions value systems. Precariously, in Eden, the pink bunny is easily within striking distance of the serpent's temptation.

In Step Right Up (2025), the viewer is greeted by Disney's smiling plastic Jiminy Cricket standing proudly atop a Rubik's Cube set on a pure white table. The unsolved Rubik's Cube stands as a visual shorthand for the complexity of society. To solve the 3D puzzle, there are reportedly 43 quintillion potential variations. Amidst so much possibility, the artist asks what is guiding our decisions in solving such perplexing situations as those with which we are faced today. 

The answer, it seems, is found in Jiminy Cricket, who served as the conscience to the famous lying puppet Pinocchio. Pinocchio wanted, more than anything, to be a real boy, not just a toy, yet for such a transformation, he would have to tell the truth and be unselfish. Thus, Jiminy Cricket was set to task to keep the puppet's nose from growing amidst the prevalence of complex decisions Pinocchio would incur. Chris Cosnowski, ever the conceptually clever tactician, nods at the absurdity of our current state of reality, his paintings acting as time capsules of our era's complexity. With a bit of nostalgic memory, one might recall it was Jiminy Cricket who famously said, "What's a conscience! I'll tell ya! A conscience is that still, small voice that people won't listen to. That's just the trouble with the world today."

The brilliance in Shimmering Tale lies in its coded language, which reads as a modern American saga. If one looks closely enough, the viewer can untangle allegories painted into the plastic pieces of nostalgic realism that allow us to see the beliefs, behaviors, and cultural memories of a nation, akin to more than three millennia of still life painters, from anonymous ancient Egyptian tomb painters to the 17th-Century Dutch still life or an Andy Warhol soup can, all tell fascinating tales about the societies in which the material culture was consumed. 

This article was originally published on August 18, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.

By: Hugh Leeman
     Daniel Cabrillos Jacobsen's show, Yesterday as in Tomorrow, of six small oil paintings at Municipal Bonds, invites the viewer's imagination to wander amidst muted tones, flattened shapes, and simplified forms, offering just enough to consider the past without telling us of its details. In detail's absence, the artist allows the rich tactile nature of texture to speak as canvas tooth shows through paint, or the rough fiber of burlap becomes an artifact acting as medium as much as support, and a fraying book cover that appears found at the far edge of memory establishes the fringes of a contemplative landscape. 
     
​     Cabrillos Jacobsen's artworks recall the paintings of early 20th-century French Impressionist Pierre Bonnard. Jacobsen, like Bonnard, often focuses on the realm just beyond our current place in the picture, past a window on the other side of a threshold, varying applications of paint permit one's eyes to pass through previous layers of paint on a visual journey into the artwork. Bonnard unlike many impressionists would not paint from life instead he would paint from memory [1] and this is where Cabrillo Jacobsen situates the viewer as what pulls one in is not what is in front of us but that which is beyond the doors and windows in an ambiguous space where brushstrokes record the beauty of banality over burlap adhered to canvas, uneven seams, and the fraying book cover lending a sense of confidence from a soul's well worn introspection.
  
     The works share a joy of solitude that consoles the yellowing pages of aged books whose earthy aroma takes us to an era of analog life. Bibliosmia is the pleasant smell caused by the chemical decomposition of binding glue and paper that supports the word's ink, its subtle sensory experience wafting into nostrils, softly whispering, one day I will be no more. Cabrillo Jacobsen's paintings remind us that memories' ultimate eventuality is to be forgotten, yet in their nebulous nature, on a journey to obsolescence, is the space left for imagination. 
     
     Such a space for imagination appears in the door in Untitled Yellow Home, where we stand before a modest table that hints at the quotidian through a coffee mug, a bowl of ripening fruit, and a vase with two yellow flowers blending with the monochromatic palette. Untitled Yellow Home shows a brown bookshelf with a plant hardly seen in brown greens, a humble wooden chair with an artwork on the wall, no details shared; it's simply a textured screen to explore. The potential in the painting comes from a vanishing point that borrows the bookshelf's brown and plants' green to construct a void, like a miniature Barnett Newman painting, line down the middle, here, separating the dark space from the door whose tiny knob transmits just enough information to mark the trailhead of what is just after the light. The entryway's orthogonal boundary furthers the effect of focus that the artist frames through a geometric cage rendered in a soft yellow-green, slightly obscured by later layers of ochre, recalling Francis Bacon's use of a similar structure. 

     Untitled Home arranges a similar scene to Untitled Yellow Home through open space created by a door's frame and the trapezoidal structure of its open door, inviting us into a place, at once certain and barely there. Unlike Untitled Yellow Home, here, after the threshold in the second space, the light is at its best, coming from a nondescript place with structures formed by soft edges heightened by the rounded corners of the canvas. The true call to curiosity is the textured strip of burlap upon which the second room is rendered with its fading details telling of a landscape just past yet another open door, pulling our eyes onto a terrace overlooking the soft topography of hills and a valley below. Eventually our eyes leave the distant topography's texture and return to the foreground, a room in browns the same tone as the unpainted portion of burlap peeks out at the top of the painting as subtle as the wooden wardrobe whose open door suggest the storage chest of mind upon which a vase, once again, supports two yellow flowers all hinting at metaphor through the sequence of open doors.
   
     The pensive atmosphere turns playful in When the Parents Away, the Cats Will Play as cats in soft silhouettes walk across the picture plane. Bonnard added cats to several of his paintings, lending his interiors a relaxed tone. Cabrillo Jacobsen performs a similar act through the cats to challenge the room's muted blues and softly shaped landscape under the dusky light of the sky seen past the wood slats of a window that leaves a lingering sense of contemplating change. Contemplative atmosphere aside, the cats, the title, and division of space between floor and wall created by a sloping seam in the canvas along with Cabrillo Jacobsen's flower vase from which two stems emerge sits all too close to the table's edge alluding to mischief indicating a story that sits untold with the books on the painting's shelf.

     Stories like memory shift with time, yet stories' malleability allows the seams of disparate memories' threads to be tied together. In Woman Reading the season shifts as early spring or late fall is rendered just past the window in leafless trees. Comfortably sitting inside, the space's protagonist, face devoid of detail, wears a shirt whose grid pattern, like the tablecloth's squares, visually connects to the several squared seams binding otherwise separate portions of canvas into a coherent whole. The show's recurring motif, a vase from which two yellow flowers emerge, sits atop a table, this time beside two mugs, one red, one blue, and a purple teapot signaling someone might sit, share tea, and a story like those of the countless others sitting on the shelves. 

     In Moonwatching, the room, its doors and windows left behind, underpainting's orange peeks from beneath a blue-purple sky, highlighting the moon's glow around the edge of leaves. Two figures in conversation, perhaps the fading memory of a first kiss, a distant horizon, and rising moon reflect across the water, story intimately interwoven with memory recalls Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest in which Algernon Moncrieff says, "Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us."[2]

     The stories from such a diary of memory are best told in Nightsky painted on a found book cover whose tattered edges and fraying fabric frame a landscape rich with elements of a Rothko in hand-held size. The book cover's red color vibrates around the border of green trees and through a thin beige wash forming a field all while enriching a purple night sky whose gradation tells the passage of time, a sense redoubled by the stars fading light that having finally reached our eyes carrying memories of places left behind, the ones we'll never know, their abstract truth like stories well told. In six small paintings, Yesterday as in Tomorrow holds the viewer through giving us places that, amidst their muted tones and simplified forms, allow us to set aside distraction and recollect with wonder how fleeting yesterday was and tomorrow will be. 


Citations:
1. “The Open Window.” The Phillips Collection, www.phillipscollection.org/collection/open-window.
2. Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. Boston: W. H. Baker Company, 1920. Baker’s Professional Plays. PDF file. Internet Archive, https://ia601308.us.archive.org/12/items/importanceofbein1920wild/importanceofbein1920wild.pdf.

By: Hugh Leeman
This article was originally published on June 17, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.

     Masako Miki's show, Midnight March, at San Francisco's Institute of Contemporary Art, transports the viewer into a mythological realm that connects a deep folkloric past with contemporary social circumstances asking the viewer to question the stories society is built upon. 
    The artist's brightly colored, rounded sculptural forms made from densely matted felt, supported by tiny wooden legs within the ICA's dimly lit basement, backdropped by black walls of a stylized star-crowded night sky, transform the banality of the basement into a place where a distracted society can begin to gain a new angle on the shadows cast across the social landscape.
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      In addition to the felt sculptures, the artist shows three paintings on paper and three small bronze sculptures. The ICA's new location was formerly the Bank of America's flagship San Francisco branch, with the small bronze sculptures appearing alongside empty lockboxes of former bank customers.
The artist is at her best with the three dimensional felted sculptures, which draw from her Japanese heritage, inspired by Japan's oldest religion, Shinto, and its supernatural beings known as yōkai. While viewers who follow Miki's work will see images they are familiar with from previous shows in the three paintings that pull from Shinto folklore, like her cheerfully stylized fox, it is the felted yōkai sculptures that are the central theme at the ICA and so prevalent one feels that we inhabit their space as opposed to the other way around.

     To enter Midnight March, the viewer descends a staircase aside a wooden terraced forum. One can imagine the terraced forum allowed the seated, when still a bank, to take in corporate talking heads giving presentations on interest rates. For Midnight March, viewers are presented with an entirely different perspective as one can look down past the seating and steps into what used to be the bowels of the bank at a half lit world of Miki's furniture sized felt sculptures. After the viewer walks down the steps, they enter a fantastical space populated by the artist's brightly colored, mostly ambiguous entities, giving the sense that they are encountering a visual representation of what 20th-century author Joseph Campbell referred to as the poetry of metaphor in mythology.

     The yōkai's role in millennia-old Japanese folklore ranges from malevolent to benevolent spirit-like forces understood to inhabit nature's awe-inspiring landscapes, from mountains, waterfalls, and forests to the commonplace corners of a dark closet. Whatever the intentions and location may be with each yōkai, they come out at night or the times between the changing of light when day breaks to dusk, acting as warning signs or simply inciting fear. Despite the foreboding nature of their appearance in Shinto belief, Miki has recreated them as cute, soft characters that seemingly challenge perceptions of their power.

      As the show title, Midnight March implies, it is the darkest hour of night when, according to the Japanese folkloric tale famous for its yōkai spirits, Hyakki Yakō, the supernatural breaks into the real world. The yōkai's midnight march from Japan's Hyakki Yakō and into the ICA traces its way through a rich tradition of stories deeply woven into the Japanese landscape and loosely understood as a manifestation of pandemonium. 
   
     The show becomes a fitting first site responsive exhibition for the newly relocated ICA as the ancient mythological spirit world the artist has created in rainbows of colored felt break into our real world through the darkened ICA basement once stacked with the real world of bank lock boxes and filing cabinets of financial spreadsheets. The timely exhibit speaks through metaphors that pull from the past and connect to today's society, deeply searching through the fabric of its cultural history amidst what seems to be an era enmeshed in a pandemonium populated by forces inciting fear and warning of what could come or already is. 

     Dozens of Miki's colorful yōkai sculptures sitting throughout all parts of the subterranean space allow viewers to come face to face with some as tall as 6 feet while others barely reach the knee. Yet, save the rare pair of closed eyes or lips that hang from the ceiling, the forms are largely unfamiliar, allowing the viewer to experience the potential of myth to pull us from time and place and situate us in the collective unconscious. 

     Miki's installation of the felted yōkai sculptures compels us to an internal place of pondering rather than paving the way for escape. Entirely unlike the escape of dopamine drenched infinite scroll rabbit holes of internet culture that can spread pandemonium, in Midnight March, we are taken to a place that has existed all along yet is often forgotten. A place where cultural myths, when questioned, often become unstable stories swaddled in candy colors appealing to the cultural imagination. Miki's show asks us if we examine these stories, can they act as reminders of society's contemporary folklore that can then be buried in the graveyards aside ancient beliefs to which society no longer subscribes? 
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     Masako Miki's Midnight March allows us to consider the greater potential in our understanding of the cultural imagination by contrasting the dark history of yōkai in the dimly lit basement with soft, fuzzy, colorful felt forms all too large for the support of their tiny legs. Through this visual metaphor, the artist suggests the stories embedded in cultures' collective imagination and their invisible forces connected to contemporary culture's pandemonium can be toppled. This poetry of metaphor pulling from seemingly disparate sources points to art's potential for profundity and speaks directly of Miki's creative prowess.