The Seattle Weekly - Seattle, Washington
by Sue Ann Kendall
March 11, 1981
The Weekly - Seattle’s Newsmagazine. 50 cents.
Visual arts: From March Chagall to Ben Shahn – and back
HYBRID MYTHOLOGICAL creature, with the head of a man and the body of a bird, sits perched on a locomotive chariot that soars high above Manhattan – a Manhattan of tiny, distant, fragile skyscrapers. It is the image of a huge skyward-bound soul, more real than the earthbound glut of human bustle it has transcended. The myth is a personal one; it has the convincing unreality of a dream.
Its creator is Ken Segan, a printmaker whose images range from lyrical fantasy to intense Judaic humanitarianism. Born in New York, art-schooled in the midwest, and now career-bound in Seattle, Segan is having his first Seattle showing at Temple de Hirsch Sinai.
Segan’s lyricism is abundant: in his copious dream images, mutations of fish and man and of skeletons and scales break apart, multiply, overlap, and re-arrange themselves. (The Birth of an Ichthyologist # 2).
In his architectural fantasies, stacked geometric assemblages grow and spread until they fill the entire width of the plate. But it is in the images Segan devotes to Judaic themes that we see his other side, the socio-political, humanitarian one. There is a penetrating portrait etching of Martin Buber, a double portrait of two early 20th-century Zionists, and a tribute to Marc Chagall.
In J’Accuse, the skeleton of a Jew, whose chest is a six-pointed star branded “Juif,” emerges from amidst a holocaust of multicolored streaks and squiggles. Large hollow eye sockets stare relentlessly at the viewer, the accused.
Subjects in Segan’s art vacillate between social constraints or ills and release from them: sometimes it’s the Law who “is the eyes that are handcuffs that are always watching….you!” but it’s just as likely to be the soaring birdman who escapes it all. In Dream, Oh Dream! Of Sailing Ships and Shining Seas! Yes, Indeed! we see both – a man’s body recoils inward, its constraint relieved only by the image of a sailing ship that grows out of his imagination.
Segan’s work belongs to that strain of Modernism called Expressionism. At times it is overzealous, even overstated, but his kind of art often derives its effects from just such overkill, as in the portrait of Chagall whose character emerges from a charged facial landscape of fanciful dark patterns. Elsewhere the forcefulness of Segan’s forms is more simple and direct: hard, linear areas are played off against stark backgrounds (Self Portrait), or delicately structured forms are set against soft puddles of carefully chosen tones. In Genesis I, for example, a crawling, spindly, flower-like burst of light opposes its own dark, soft shadow, separating the light from the dark, the day from the night.
It is difficult to know what direction Segan’s art will take. His artistic roots lie in German Expressionist woodcuts and in the Social Realism of Americans like Ben Shahn, yet the spirit of Chagall is very much alive in his images of personal fantasy. That he digs in both wells is not surprising – Expressionism and fantasy both traffic in the unbounded energies of raw emotion.
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Ken Akiva Segan - Etchings and mixed media works
Temple de Hirsch Sinai, through 3/6
Odd hours on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday
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