Spectacular visual mashup from Kako Ueda

One of Kako Ueda's intricate paper cuts is up at the Museum of Craft and Design in SF. Ueda is fascinated by the constantly shifting boundaries between nature and culture, as well as the way those two states influence/support each other, and her work can often look as if it's one careless X-acto knife slice away from collapsing back into the void. The 50" X 50" piece in this show, Memento Mori, looms over the exhibition's entrance. This might have been a misstep on the curator's part. The piece is so intensely detailed, it works like a narcotic pulling you deeper and deeper in. Even studying it for 15 minutes didn't seem like enough time to me. By then, though, I was in other people's way and a little exhausted so I moved on. The rest of the show, "Obsessive Reductive" (up through March 30), is wonderful. Sadly, I gave the remaining artists' work shorter shrift. But maybe, I reasoned, this was the only piece I needed to see closely. What's that saying: an entire world in a grain of sand. 

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