USA: Artist aims to rejuvenate seniors with new piece

USA: Artist aims to rejuvenate seniors with new piece

DAVIS, CALIFORNIA (THE DAVIS ENTERPRISE), June 13, 2005:

Kana Tanaka's installation, "Rejuvenation," dedicated Friday at the Davis Senior Center, features perhaps 200 tiny glass raindrops from a few inches long to about eight feet long. It is, what Kana Tanaka imagines, what you would see if you could stop the rain.

The drops are not suspended by string or wire, but are of one piece -- Tanaka stretched each piece of glass under heat until the tails of the drops appeared as thin as a human hairs.

Viewed just inside the entrance to the recently opened addition to the center, the drops change color from left to right, fading from a deep amber, almost brown, to clear, then gradually take on color again, ending in bright green on the right.

Tanaka said that shift in colors represents the change in seasons -- the colors would be reflected by rain drops in the dry summer and early fall, then the rain of winter and, finally, with the blooming of spring.

"I hope people feel rejuvenated when they see it," she said.

Her grandparents in her native Japan -- who are very old now and who spend their days looked after by Tanaka's aunt -- do not have a place like Davis' Senior Center to go where they can enjoy themselves, make friends and explore new things.

"(Seniors) are much happier here, I think, and I wanted to help them to feel joyful," said Tanaka, 33.

Her proposal was unanimously chosen from among three finalists by a six-person panel that included representatives of Senior Citizens of Davis, the Alternative Recreation Program, which recently moved into the center, and the Civic Arts Commission.

"I love it," Esther Polito, cultural services manager for the city, said of Tanaka's work Friday. "The piece, to me, is very theatrical. It really is a frozen moment in time, with Kana's imagery using the colors of the landscape. I can feel that moment. I can imagine sitting and looking at it and not growing bored."

A native of Aichi, Japan, Tanaka has studied at the National Aichi University of Education in Japan, Cleveland Institute of Art and Rhode Island School of Design. She taught hot-glassworking and sculpture classes at the Rhode Island school and University of Hartford before working as a staff artist at an architectural glass firm in Napa. Grants have since allowed her to develop a series of gallery installations -- including a 2003 piece at the Davis Art Center -- and public art projects, including a large installation dedicated last month at the new Solano County Administration Building in Fairfield. She maintains a studio in Mare Island, where she also creates glass pieces used as part of theatrical set designs.

Tanaka said that she was first introduced to clay, wood and weaving and other mediums before discovering glass in the early 1990s. "When I saw someone blowing glass," she said, "everything else became nothing to me."

Glass work appealed to her because it takes patience and practice over many years to master.

She came to the United States to study because she wanted to learn about glass in a "more open-minded atmosphere." Glass work in Europe, by comparison, usually centered on the traditional.

Many of the top names in glass art are men, she said, men prone to making large, colorful individual pieces. To copy them would surely be profitable, she said, but such large-scale work gave her carpal tunnel syndrome, her hands and wrists aching.

She decided, then, that rather that "repeat someone else's path," she'd would instead strive to work with groups of smaller glass pieces, usually clear to allow the viewer to see them change with the light. Her work would be soothing, quiet.

"Rejuvenation" took about 10 hours of work, done at the Senior Center because the finished strands -- the raindrops or "glassdrops," as Tanaka calls them -- are too fragile to transport easily. As she worked with her torch, seniors played bingo in the next room.

Because the finished installation would not be near a window where the glass could reflect the colors of the day, and because she wanted to make sure seniors could see the small drops, she used colored glass. Those colors had to tell a story, though, she said. Ultimately, she settled on the seasons of the Central Valley.

The piece represents Tanaka's first permanent installation, hanging in a glass case.

"It's very exciting," she said. "The others I've done are temporary, but they're very labor intensive. In some ways I like that limitation -- I like that it stays only in people's memories. When I take them down, though, it's always sad."

Protected in the center's case, the drops will remain untouched -- Tanaka says that, for some reason, people want to touch glass when they wouldn't dare touch a painting -- so that people may come back and see them in the morning, afternoon or evening.

Mayor Ruth Asmundson, who introduced Tanaka at the dedication, pronounced the piece "fabulous." It's the latest addition to what the center can already boast is the largest public art collection in Davis, many of those pieces paid for by the seniors themselves or in conjunction with the city.

"The Civic Arts Commission is so productive and so wonderful," Asmundson said. "My personal goal is to have walking through Davis be like walking through a gallery."

Tanaka's work can be seen at kanatanaka.com.

Cory Golden/Enterprise staff writer cgolden@davisenterprise.net