SSNYC’s curatorial program is dedicated to promoting contemporary visual art focusing on the research and exploration of three dimensional work with an emphasis towards ceramics.
Sculpture Space NYC is pleased to announce NAP by Yuko Nishikawa! Opening Reception Friday, June 14 from 6:00p.m to 9:00pm.
Yuko Nishikawa Solo Exhibition "NAP"
June 14th-July 27th
Opening Reception: Friday,June 14th from 6PM to 9 PM
"I want to find beautiful and strange things right around us, not only in our distant memories or hopes for the future or out somewhere else, and I want my work to belong to a place close to us."
Yuko Nishikawa is a designer and ceramic artist based in Brooklyn, NY, creating sculptural lighting, installations, custom tableware, and fantastical objects. In her studio she also runs a monthly talk event, Salon at Forest, a gathering and conversation of creative minds.
Working for years on functional objects for the home and interior design, Yuko encountered clay, a material that opened up wider expressions and experiments for her. At first, bowls and then vases, which lead her to develop artisan collections for Calvin Klein Home and Anthropologie. Then in 2017, she took a sabbatical to work on collaborations for retail and hospitality clients, including Halifax, a restaurant in W Hotel Hoboken, and The James New York, all the while exhibiting artwork and installations through galleries and retailers in Milan, New York, and New Jersey. In 2018, she established a design and art company specializing in sculptural lighting, art objects and installations.
Yuko Nishikawa was raised in a beach-town south of Tokyo, Japan.
’NAP’ by Yuko Nishikawa:
A nap relaxes us and energizes us, and when it's over, lets us go back to do our own thing. I wanted to create a space just like that, a brief midday break from the noise and clutter. It's not a backpacking journey that I don't know whether or when I will return. Rather, it is only a few-minutes trip that I will come back from to where I started before drifting away.
In this Exhibition I am showing new work together with work I have made over the last year, all installed to be experienced in a new way. After my last exhibition I felt something was missing, something to anchor to our everyday lives, so I decided to add a chair (please sit). I want to find beautiful and strange things right around us, not only in our distant memories or hopes for the future or out somewhere else, and I want my work to belong to a place close to us.
Two summers ago, I traveled to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. On the beaches I saw stones with multiple smooth round deep indentations made by sea bugs. I found one, looked around, and found more. I collected more of these strange stones as we trekked along the coast. They looked intentionally made, like an inscription, as if it's supposed to mean something. They were like faces, some look friendlier, funnier or meaner than others. The holes made me curious and want to get closer to them. I think this was when I started incorporating holes in my work. Each form is hand-built in white earthenware, terra-cotta, or stoneware clay, then finished in engobe with oxides and mason stains, and fired in an electric kiln in my studio in Brooklyn.
I hope you take a little break to let your mind wander through the forms. Let the noise from the busy day recede. We all know how to nap.
