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Swarm Gallery

April 21 - May 28, 2012

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http://swarmgallery.com/
(510) 839-2787

560 Second Street Oakland, CA 94607

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Masako Miki, Caught By a Rainbow, 2012

Gallery | ANCILLARY ADAPTATIONS | Masako Miki Project | AMALGAM | Joe Penrod Reception Saturday, April 21, 2012 6-8pm Swarm Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of multi-media works by Masako Miki, ANCILLARY ADAPTATIONS, on view from April 21 - May 27, 2012. An installation by Joe Penrod, AMALGAM, is presented in the project space. Masako Miki's work explores the idea of synthesis. She manipulates contradicting spatial elements such as flatness and illusion to suggest a disoriented context. The narrative is based on her own experiences of living in the United States for seventeen years, and dilemnas of her cultural identity. Her works explore how one can truly assimilate to a foreign environment, considering both pessimism and optimism. In the constant adjustment of her own personal cultural assimilation, she has experienced feelings of perplexity, incongruity, and obscurity. Ultimately, she believes that different cultures can be hybridized to become a unique alternative one. In her process of making work, she seeks to achieve this equilibrium. In ANCILLARY ADAPTATIONS, Miki considers personal transformation, and the necessary process of both adapting to a new environment and evolving as a person. Acknowledgement and realization is the central narrative here. Finally, insight into who she was in the past, leads to who she is now, and ultimately who she wants to become. Miki uses deer to symbolize survival, as they are a highly adaptable species. Their ability to adjust and integrate has allowed them to subsist throughout the world. This series was inspired by the hypothesis of an alternative reality, where order in the deer's lifecycle is challenged. The shedding and re-growth of the antlers represents a process of survival. What if the beautiful antlers keep growing until they reach the sky? What if there were no predators of deer? What is growing has to die in order to mature the process. Maybe it is okay to leave something that was part of us because it will grow again. Maybe it is also okay if we lose it forever. The mundane is the object of Joe Penrod's work. It often becomes invisible to us. Through his exploration of simple materials, he calls attention to the immaterial; turning a moment in time into an object; solidifying the brief interaction between light and eye. He is interested in impermanence and the forgotten, in the barely remembered and barely perceived.

Joe Penrod, AMALGAM, 2012