Naomi Nakazato, _copy.FINAL.usethisone, 2022, Laser print transfer on wood panel, urethane, plexiglass, 24.5 x 36.5 x 2 in (62.2 x 92.7 x 5.1 cm), 24.5 x 18.25 x 2 in (62.2 x 46.4 x 5.1 cm), (Individual).
Zona maco 2023
naomi nakazato
Dyadic Thresholds
February 8 - 12, 2023
Booth #EJ18
Centro Citibanamex
Av. del Conscripto 311, Lomas de Sotelo,
Miguel Hidalgo, 11200, Mexico City
Olympia is pleased to present Dyadic Thresholds, fifteen pieces by Brooklyn-based artist Naomi Nakazato. Nakazato’s practice invests in the interruption of traditional tropes of landscape painting, co-opting the genre to accommodate the distillation of a biracial narrative. The artist’s materials-based approach combines sculpture, printmaking, and digital methods of rendering that mirrors a synthesis of worlds within worlds, examining cultural and physical hybridity.
Nakazato describes this new body of work as “nonspaces”, an idea that is informed by linguistic nonfluency from a Japanese and western/American upbringing. Digital and analog methods of artmaking are joined by traditional printmaking processes to create a physical representation of translation and Nakazato’s own affirmation of heterogeneous experience. In this construction of space, authenticity can be structured by narrative, rather than typical measures of authenticity.
This new body of work is part of an ongoing conversation on cultural and racial passing. Diptychs reference the western standard, archetype, norm, and model of the binary, creating two selves in contradiction with one another. The repeated patches of landscape are created with digital and mechanical methods, referencing the modern digitization of the natural world (as in Google Maps) and the traditional vernacular of landscape to describe sensorial liminality.
Through field studies, remote digital mapping, and documents of becoming, Nakazato works to nourish an individualized and imperfect view of place and self that have more layers of meaning or relationships than immediately meets the eye.
Naomi Nakazato, Woolly Mouth, Agape, 2020, Urethane, aluminum leaf, screenprint on plexiglass, 18 x 12 x 5 in (45.7 x 30.5 x 12.7 cm)
Naomi Nakazato (b. 1992) is a Japanese-American, multidisciplinary artist whose predominately materials-based practice surveys the conglomerate 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 and an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art. Her recent work and installations have been exhibited at Below Grand (NY), Olympia (NY), Galerie Tracanelli (Grenoble, FR), and PADA (Barreiro, PT). She is the recent recipient of grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, FST Studio Projects Funds, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. Nakazato lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Naomi Nakazato is represented by Olympia.
Naomi Nakazato in her studio, Brooklyn, NY, 2022.
INSTALLATION VIEWS:
