Hiroyuki Hamada arrived in Provincetown on March 1 to spend the month as a mid-career artist-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center. Now, though FAWC is closed to the public because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and an artist talk and open studio that had been scheduled for Hamada were both canceled, he continues to work in his studio at the work center. Before the crisis limited social interactions on the Outer Cape, he sat down with the Independent to offer some insights on his art and how it interacts with the world.

Hamada, who lives and works in East Hampton, N.Y., has a long history with Provincetown. He was a FAWC fellow in 1995-96, and the time he spent at the work center was, he says, a great privilege and a turning point in his career. He has since been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1998 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. Being back in Provincetown has been an opportunity for Hamada to reflect on his evolution as an artist. He is a soft-spoken man, who chooses his words with care.

“Because this is a place where I used to be, I’m thinking about how things were,” he says. “It’s very interesting. I was very idealistic as a young artist. I believed in the power of art — that we can all speak the same language, that art can connect people, transcend differences. I learned, however, that there is a definite hierarchy in our society that we can’t ignore. And that all the good things about art can also be used as a justification for the social framework we have in place.” That framework gives him pause.

“This is the structural difficulty for the artist within our society,” Hamada says. “As artists, we make art and work with institutions thinking that we are doing good, that we are working for the people. But if we look at the institutions that are part of our social framework, they have the tendency to uphold the ruling class. It’s a difficult situation, and I don’t really have the answers.”

While he feels that art should be “something that is more than money and power,” Hamada insists that when art is used as a tool toward an end, it loses something. “Art can affect people in some ways, but it’s not going to cause social change,” he says. “There is something very human about art, something very fragile. If we try to use art for a particular means, and if that notion comes across, the quality is muddied.”

Instead, Hamada believes that what an artist can offer society is both deeper and less easily defined. “When I’m in the studio, I listen to what I am doing and pay attention to everything that is going on,” he says. “I try to express something that is cohesive, strong, and profound on its own.”

His creative process is intuitive, but he has gained experience over the years. “I have learned the skill of connecting dots when I see things,” he says. “We can’t ignore certain things in the studio in favor of others. In a painting, for example, you want colors to speak, shapes to speak. Everything has to work together — nothing can be left out or wasted. One force is met with other forces, and all these things have to be taken into consideration at once. That kind of approach has allowed me to see life in a different way. You can’t just change something and expect everything else to stay the same: if you make one change, everything becomes different.”

Hamada came to the U.S. from Japan reluctantly at age 18 — his family moved here because of a job his father was offered — and he studied painting in college, getting an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland. He began to work in sculpture for the first time as a fellow at FAWC, 25 years ago.

“I became interested in sculptural qualities, in objectness and textures, as opposed to creating a painting to look into, with visual narratives and themes,” he says. “So, my paintings grew out of the wall and became three-dimensional.”

Hamada’s sculptures, which he purposefully never titles so as not to limit the viewer’s interpretation, often emerge around found objects that, he says, “begin to speak” to him. A sculpture-in-progress in his studio, for example, contains an object he found on the beach, an object that was lying in his studio, and a piece of recycled wood. In addition to found objects, Hamada creates with construction materials — wood, foam, joint compound, and resin. “I have come up with my own way of working with my materials,” he says.

Despite his focus on sculpture, Hamada has continued to draw and paint throughout his career. And while he has been in Provincetown, he has watched his work evolve in unexpected directions. “I’m curious to see what this one is going to be,” he says of one piece. “I think it is coming back to two-dimensionality. It’s a relief. If you look at it from the side, it’s definitely distorted. If I like how this one turns out, I might welcome more pieces like this.”

It’s unusual for an accomplished artist to want to share with the public not only completed, polished work but also works-in-progress and even notes, sketches, and inspirations, offering an intimate look at the artist’s practice. But that’s exactly what visual arts fellow Jake Troyli is planning to do Friday evening at his Fine Arts Work Center studio, instead of the usual exhibit of new work at the Hudson D. Walker Gallery.

“I decided to do an open studio, because it’s a different level of context,” he says. “It’s sort of like you’re walking directly into my head.” He laughs.

Having spent his early childhood in St. Petersburg, Fla., Troyli moved to Boston with his mother, also an artist, at age nine, and completed his M.F.A. from the University of South Florida last year. This past summer, he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, then took up residence as a fellow at FAWC. He’s currently working on paintings for an upcoming solo show at Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago.

“There are paintings in my studio right now that are finished, there are paintings that are 75 percent done, and then there are paintings that are 15 percent to 20 percent complete. I think that will be interesting for the viewer,” Troyli says. He tends to work on up to 15 paintings in a variety of dimensions at the same time. “I like to be able to move from painting to painting, so that I don’t ever feel that I’m getting exhausted with a single piece. They all come together concurrently.”

The walls of Troyli’s studio are covered in written notes and what he calls a “visual diary” of sketches, drawings, and images that he came across and finds interesting, all of which eventually work themselves into his paintings. “I draw inspiration from everywhere at all times,” he says. “When I’m in a new place, I respond to the environment.” Troyli calls the landscape around him a “temporary permanent” that he can’t help but react to.

“Especially with my self-portraiture, I feel that it just makes sense for the work to reflect the space I’m in,” he says. “You’re sort of manipulating and contorting yourself to fit into your new surroundings. It becomes a monument to time spent, in some way.”

For Troyli, interactions of time and place are always evolving. “I’ve been thinking a lot about identity as performance, and so I think a lot about the self, and the idea of the self, as an elastic thing,” he says. “By using my own form as a sort of malleable avatar, and appropriating motifs from both the classical and the comic, my paintings can exist in a space that defies and subverts immediate assumption and can challenge the relationship the viewer has with them.”

At six-foot-nine, Troyli understands the challenges of fitting into spaces, and as a basketball player in college, he has also experienced “the act of being observed,” he says. “While I was playing basketball, I started to think of this in terms of life, about how the crowd is paying to watch, even feels entitled to watch the players, and how the players essentially are working for the crowd. I think my basketball career, in retrospect, made me really critical of the audience-spectacle relationship. There is a tension there that I think about a lot in my art.”

This is true in his self-portraits and also in works with grander vistas, such as High Noon at Ranchland®, which takes a voyeuristic point of view of dozens of naked cowboys in what appears to be a Western theme park. “With the large-scale work in particular, I think of those figures as being almost at the mercy of the person looking at the work,” Troyli says. “There are these intimate moments that you have access to, because I chop off the top of the building so you can see everything happening inside. It becomes like an ant farm, in a way.”

Being at the work center in Provincetown, Troyli says, has affected not only his work but also his productivity. “I’ve had the space and time to just put my head down and paint. And the cold, silence, and solitude have added reasons to work. I already have a borderline obsessive work ethic, and this place has just magnified that. As much as I love to procrastinate, in a space like this, even that becomes hard to do. It’s been amazing and incredibly challenging all at once.”

A Room With a View

Due to public health concerns, all open studios, gallery events, and readings at the Fine Arts Work Center have been cancelled through the end of April.