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Image of Washer/Dryer #2

Kaz Oshiro

Japanese/American, b. 1967

Washer/Dryer #2
2005

Acrylic and bondo on stretched canvas
43 x 27 x 28 in. (109.22 x 68.58 x 71.12 cm)
Gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation
2005.85.1-2

Kaz Oshiro’s Washer/Dryer #2 at first appears to be a monument to the mundane. A General Electric logo, settings for “casuals” and “whites,” even a splash of hot pink (evidence of a college student’s sloppiness?) add up to a celebration of a domestic task. But step behind the work, and the uncanny nature of Oshiro’s art is revealed: Washer/Dryer is made of stretcher bars and canvas, acrylic paint and Bondo. Identifying as a painter rather than as a sculptor, Oshiro considers the work a still life in three dimensions. It is one so realistic that it could be mistaken for a readymade, if not the real thing.

Oshiro has made many trompe l’oeil constructions over the last two decades, including Marshall guitar amps, a paint-spattered dumpster, and a musician’s battered and stickered road case. This endeavor points to several developments in the history of contemporary art. The reproduction of commonplace objects echoes pop art’s relocation of everyday items and images into the space of high art, while the sleek lines of the appliances allude to minimalist sculpture. The gestural, Pollock-like drizzle of detergent on this piece represents, the artist says, his love of abstraction: “I see myself as a still-life painter trying to become an abstract painter.”

Unique among Oshiro’s sculptural re-creations is Washer/Dryer’s special concern with scale. Around the time he was making the piece, the artist was fascinated by the relationship between space and object. “I realized one of the biggest appliances sits in the smallest space in a living environment,” he says. “I made the washer and dryer imagining that I’d show it in a gallery space of less than one hundred square feet”—something that has not yet happened.

Paul Schmelzer

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