Nobuhito Nishigawara
,
Hiromi Takizawa
,
See Line Gallery presents Dichotomies, an exhibition curated by Janet Levy featuring Nobuhito Nishigawara’s clay sculptures and Hiromi Takizawa’s works in glass.
Using historical and cultural references to rediscover and question identity, the work of Nobuhito Nishigawara and Hiromi Takizawa offers insight into the complicated navigation of cultural difference. Their sculptural work performs these histories with a sense of wit, confidence and vulnerability, materially pointing to the dichotomies that exist in the present.
Exploring the open-endedness of human relationships and cultural semiology, Nobuhito Nishigawara’s works in clay reflect the uncertainty of self-perception and various permutations of aesthetic signifiers. Within this uncertainty, one finds a sense of liberation and consternation—circuits of meaning that continually slide. For Nishigawara, the donkey has become one nexus of just this kind of representation: its fraught figure is a symbol of both ignorance and hard work, of the stubborn and the gentle. The childlike form that Nishigawara gives the donkey reminds us of the malleability of culture and the naiveté with which we often confront such multifarious images.
For Hiromi Takizawa, working with glass has provided a material identity for the confluence of Japanese and American cultural traditions. Inspired by the American phenomenon of “super-sizing” and personal memories of picking up teeth after her grandfather’s ritual cremation, Takizawa has created a series of giant glass teeth. The teeth are created through a process of blowing and sculpting molten glass, to eventually form hard and fragile forms—a process that speaks to our dynamic yet tenuous relationship with memory and ever-converging cultural realities. Similar to the rituals surrounding losing teeth as a child, representations such as these become markers of time, reminders of the beauty and anxiety of the present.
Nobuhito Nishigawara was born in Nagoya, Japan and received his BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and MFA from Arizona State University. His work has been featured in exhibitions in New York, Arizona, New Mexico and California as well as museums across the country. He will be presenting work in the upcoming exhibition Contemporary Art Forum, Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
Hiromi Takizawa was born in Nagano, Japan, and recently completed her MA at California State University, Fullerton, CA. She was awarded scholarships from Pilchuck Glass School, WA and The Corning Museum of Glass, New York. She has exhibited her work in the Orange County Contemporary Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA. Her work was recently featured in the Greater LA MFA exhibition, Long Beach CA.
This exhibition was made possible with support from The Japan Foundation.
