"Nostalgia and Fantasy: Imagination and its Origins in Contemporary Art" is a ragtag grouping of nine individual artists and one unit, each of whom focus on extremely different things. It is difficult to say, in fact, where "nostalgia" and "fantasy" come into play in some instances. With only minimal wall-panel descriptions, contextualization is a major stumbling point, not the least with the subtitle and the supposed origins of the imagination in contemporary art. Many of the works, however, are outstanding.
Among the best is the superlative super-realist painter Sai Hashizume, whose technical mastery and compositional skills place her among the best young painters working today. Some of the work borrows from a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen in which the poor protagonist, Karen, is taken in by a wealthy women and is given bright red shoes that she wears to church to everyone's consternation.
The shoes take over her life forcing her to continually dance until, eventually, she has to have her feet amputated and seeks Christian redemption. Hashizume's "Still Life with Skull" (2011) is a vanitas still-life painting with bright red high heels set amongst symbolic death imagery, such as a skull, open book and tipped over glass. These are the conventions of 17th-century Dutch painting, though the computer set within the other objects is an obvious technological update. Her other paintings deal with sexualized female imagery, though the heads are cropped or the visage obscured. "Girls Start the Riot" (2010-11) almost has a Balthus-like quality