Kanda & Oliveira is pleased to announce the exhibition "Be still in prayer" by Anna Nakazawa, Camilla Taylor, and Aiko Miyanaga from February 1 to March 1. The three artists come from different religious and cultural backgrounds, and their works can express a strong sense of life and death.
Nakazawa creates stone and unglazed wood carvings, firmly connected to her faith as a Christian. She believes that creating is preparing to meet God and waiting for that moment. She explains that the garment seen as a motif in her most representative works represents personality, not something to be enhanced, but something to be “put on” anew, an exercise in becoming less dependent on herself.
Taylor continues to make monochrome prints and ceramics. She was raised in a Mormon family and later parted ways with that community when her mother became a cult leader. She never believed in God, and felt like a voyeur in religion. Her works show the ambivalence between the individual, its introspective posture, and the idea of a group, of different social strata even, where roles and identities differ. In this world, the mundane can be specific, can be an identity, can have a meaning.
Miyanaga is known for her sculptures and installations using naphthalene, resin, and glass. Forms made of naphthalene sublimate and disappear over time, but in the glass case they change shape and continue to recrystallize. Resonating with notions of impermanence and reincarnation, her works express “a world that continues to exist despite change".
In the works of these three artists, we can see a sign that someone or something was there, and even feel a sense of loss, but by accepting these traces, they show us how we can live.
