Shirley Kaneda: Doubled prisms

This article examines the work of Shirley Kaneda, the Korean-Japanese American artist. It discusses various paintings from Kaneda’s output, both from the 1990s and from the last six years, in order to draw out her concerns and intentions. In this light it also explores her statements from articles and interviews in thinking through her intertwining of both theoretical and painterly concerns. It moves from the context of her early work in the Conceptual Abstraction exhibition of 1991 at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, to the actual form and procedures that the work implements. Formalism, or post-formalism here, develops the means to deconstruct certain inherited tropes of modernism and provide a new re-formation of them, and here Kaneda draws both on feminist, modernist and poststructuralist ideas. This also has implications for the viewer and how the work frames and proposes material for an encounter with these elements. The bracketing of early and recent work highlights ongoing continuities and differences within Kaneda’s oeuvre.