naomi nakazato

spirit duplicator

October 12 - December 14, 2024

New York City: 41 Orchard Street

VIEW WORKS

Olympia is pleased to present Spirit Duplicator, Naomi Nakazato’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Nakazato’s visual practice examines the nuances of creating art as a biracial only child in the United States. In Spirit Duplicator, the artist’s reflections on her Japanese grandmother’s funeral catalyze an exploration of identity, perfectionism, legacy, and cultural transference. Experimental across mediums, each work addresses a funerary rite—from flower cutting to the ceremonial placing of bones in an urn, to the stock images of a funerary display before the ceremony.

Landscape and still life are reprogrammed, infused with tenderness to honor practices that Nakazato struggles to apprehend fully. As she attempts to grasp unfamiliar funerary traditions, Nakazato turns to familiar motifs and unconventional materials from the natural world. Chrysanthemums, weeds, and rocks are cloned, stretched, and outlined–all methods of control that reflect a desire to reconfigure the self and balance multi-cultural perspectives through their arrangement. 

The prominence of seaweed underscores Nakazato's grandmother's encouragement of its consumption, linking it to traditional beliefs of its positive effects on health and longevity, while its pairing with aluminum—designed to mimic silver—suggests a nuanced relationship between purity and imitation. Feelings of imposter syndrome heighten her disconnect as she navigates unfamiliar customs, instilling the work with an unavoidable imperfection. Visual repetition of these touchstone motifs in the studio leads not to mechanized precision but to fragments of a mutable narrative that, unexpectedly, become family portraits.

Spirit Duplicator references a historical printmaking technique that uses alcohol to dissolve ink—a method Nakazato does not directly employ but instead imitates through screenprinting and solvent transfers. Through this process, she positions herself as a device and translator of two cultures, forging a unique, imperfect, personal language. Her labor-intensive process highlights the transience of memory, people, and objects; ultimately offering a meditation on the complexities of mourning and the intertwined personal and cultural acts that, though at times unfamiliar or confusing, connect us to our past, present, and future.

Naomi Nakazato is a Japanese-American multidisciplinary artist whose predominantly materials-based practice surveys the complex landscape of memory, language, and the artificial authenticity of the biracial experience. Her work utilizes the semiotics and syntactic intervention of natural objects to examine the weight of authenticity and the yearning to articulate a simultaneously close and unfamiliar self.

Nakazato holds a BA in Painting and Drawing from the South Carolina School of the Arts (2014) and an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art (2018).

Solo and two-person exhibitions include: Olympia (Solo, New York, NY, 2024), Zona Maco (Solo, Mexico City, Mexico, 2023), LVL3 (Two-person, Chicago, IL, 2023), and Below Grand (Solo, New York, NY, 2022). Selected group exhibitions include Make Room (Los Angeles, CA, 2024), Island (New York, NY, 2023), The Print Center (New York, NY, 2024), Charles Moffett (New York, NY, 2023), and Galerie Tracanelli (Grenoble, France, 2021), among others.

Nakazato has held residencies at The University of Texas (Austin, TX, 2023), PADA (Barreiro, Portugal, 2022), Tiger Strikes Asteroids (Brooklyn, NY, 2020), and the Lower East Side Printshop (New York, NY, 2019). She is the recipient of awards from The Print Center (2024), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2020), FST Studio Projects Funds (2019), and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2017, 2016).

Nakazato lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.