Details:
① Artwork:
Scales
The staccato composition of this artwork was inspired by the artist’s experience accompanying a friend who was testing out pianos by playing scales, sometimes with drawn-out notes to see how long each key held its sound.
In Nakamura’s colored-pencil drawings, variegated lines move across, alongside, and into fields of color, assembling into amorphous compositions that simultaneously build and dissolve. Some have visual links to existing symbols and objects, becoming meditations on death and metaphysics that provide a space for questioning, grief, memorial, humor, and healing. The paper varies in size and shape, and is often handmade in her Chicago studio.
For Nakamura, abstraction is a type of wayfaring — of following signs and guideposts that reveal themselves along a path to an endpoint, which often references sense memories of her relationship to nature and sound. She deliberates on each element while aggregating them into a larger entity, resulting in a series of embedded encounters that collectively create a harmonic composition.
Specs:
③ Artist:
Aya Nakamura’s colored pencil drawings on irregularly-shaped handmade paper reference the artist’s aural and visual memories. For Nakamura, abstraction is a type of wayfaring — of following signs and guideposts that reveal themselves along a path to arrive at an endpoint. She works in pencil, which slows down time so she can deliberate on each element while aggregating them into a larger entity. The result is a series of embedded encounters that collectively create a harmonic composition.
Aya Nakamura was born in 1982 in Tokyo, Japan, and lives in Chicago, IL. She received her BA in Fine Arts and Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA (2004); her Post-Bacc in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL (2011); and her MFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL (2013).
Nakamura has mounted solo and two-person exhibitions at Western Exhibitions in Chicago, IL (2022); MPSTN in Fox River Grove, IL (2019); Rainbo Club in Chicago, IL (2019); and Final Resting Place in Chicago, IL (2017).
Her work has been featured in group exhibitions such as Concentrate and Ask Again at Heaven Gallery in Chicago, IL (2023); Drawing Biennial at Western Exhibitions in Chicago, IL (2023); In Good Company at Monira Foundation in Chicago, IL (2021); Mana Decentralized at Mana New Jersey in Jersey City, NJ (2019); and Bibliothēca at Roman Susan in Chicago, IL (2018).
She has received the Denbo Fellowship from Pyramid Atlantic Art Center (2019) and the George and Ann Siegel Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013).
The staccato composition of this artwork was inspired by the artist’s experience accompanying a friend who was testing out pianos by playing scales, sometimes with drawn-out notes to see how long each key held its sound. In Nakamura’s colored-pencil drawings, often on handmade paper of different sizes and shapes, variegated lines move across, alongside, and into fields of color, assembling into amorphous compositions that simultaneously build and dissolve. Some have visual links to existing symbols and objects, becoming meditations on death and metaphysics that provide a space for questioning, grief, memorial, humor, and healing.More
- Framed: 32.0 x 35.0 x 1.5 in.
- Signed on verso
