The American - Surrey, England
Published by Farnham Castle Newspapers, Surrey, England
The only newspaper published in Britain for all Americans
10 JulY 1987, No. 272 price 20 pence
NORTH OF THE BORDER: Aberdeen Art Gallery hosts ideological battler as artist in residence
by Anne Flann
VISITORS at Aberdeen Art Gallery may encounter the slim figure of artist in residence Ken Akiva Segan while they wander through the upper balcony gallery where is work is displayed.
Born in Manhattan, N.Y. in 1950, Segan, in his own words "lived in an incubator, fostering ideas on art and aesthetics." When his family moved to Brooklyn and then onto eastern Queens, Segan pursued his learning from one school, to another, attending evening classes at the Art Students' League, under Gregory D'Alessio. He received his bachelor's degree at Southern Illinois University in printmaking and drawing," creating ideological battles with many of my professors."
He briefly attended Washington University, in St. Louis, Missouri, where he received support from "the outstanding American draughtsman-painter Arthur Osver." He earned a master's degree at University of Missouri in 1980.
Influenced by landscape
Segan attended a summer art program at Academy of Fine Arts, Cracow, Poland in 1984, where landscape became a major interest. He traveled through Britain, and Western and Eastern Europe for six months, and is now spending four months in Aberdeen on the "artist-in-residence" program.
Looking around the gallery at his work one is aware of humor, sardonic, whimsical and often defensive. There is also an underlying sadness to some. The works are infinitely detailed, so that one has to return and re-examine in depth after the first cursory glance. It would be very easy to dismiss them as frivolous works and enjoy them as such.
Segan has a propensity towards fish and birds and they are to be found in most of his drawings, minutely tucked away or blatantly taking over. His list of exhibitions is impressive and his works are in far-flung collections. A film, "The Eternal Jew," was made by Israeli film maker Yoram Yehoshua featuring large wood carvings and sculptures, with narration and Jewish music sung and played by the Segan. Segan wants people to ask about his work, enjoys their comments and seeing it through their eyes. There is a touch of cynicism underlying some works.
"I see tragedy and tremendous humor in the work," he said, and referring to the Jewish people he sees a tremendous zest for life, even in the midst of tragedy. His visit to Poland obviously had a great influence on him.
He is working in a mixed media now combining drawings with wood.
"I'm at a threshhold between drawing and etching - a whole new process, it's going to have an effect on the image," he said. "It's like the difference between a car and a bike - the mechanisms of motion are different. Your experience on the road is different, where you and going to get to is different."
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P.S. by Akiva K. Segan, on 18 January 2021 while typing the text of the 1987 article. This was a great article that Anne Flann wrote! I was glad I got to say hello to her for a few minutes during my first teaching trip to Scotland in 2008. While typing this I chuckled on reading the sentence about Yoram Yehoshua's film The Eternal Jew* which concludes with "...narration and Jewish music sung and played by the Segan." I recall my 2 closest friends in Aberdeen at the time, who were art students at Grays Art School in Aberdeen, Deb Schultz* (now a professor of art historian in London) and Mat Fahrenholz (a working artist living in Warsaw, Poland) thought that sentence, about "music sung and played by the Segan," was hilarious.
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*A shortened version of “The Eternal Jew” by Yoram Yehoshua (his last name in English is frequently shown as Joshua) is on Youtube. (A few years ago he re-edited the film to the length seen in the Youtube post; originall the film, which was his senior thesis project at the School of Cinema & Photography, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, was longer).
The video url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgrZRrpbUXk
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A video of Dr. Schultz's lecture at Seattle's Frye Art Museum, 2002, is viewable on Youtube.
While the art is hard to see (the video was made from a VHS camcorder film) the narration is very clear, and it includes her mentioning about she and Mat having called Segan "gramps" back then (as he was so much so much older than they were. I was 37 when I lived in Aberdeen those 5 months; they were both of college student age).
The url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uma7RVogFj4