Nonaka-Hill

Tomoko Obana and Toru Otani do not know each-other, however their artistic procedures are neighborly, relishing delight in form and in color; earthy to Victorian from the hands of Obana, and from Old World towards Fauve in the hands of Otani.

For her vitrine sculptures, Tomoko Obana collects vintage, industrially produced wares such as water and perfume bottles, jugs, bud vases and more. She makes a mold of these found objects by which she produces one hundred casts; ten each of ten different types of clay slip, kiln fired with various woods, amounting to one-hundred unique “ash glazed” iterations. The artist contemplates the nuances of sooty and dappled surfaces of her objects and settles on arrangements which may, in the Western canon, resemble the paintings of Giorgio Morandi, but which, for the artist, give a nod to the aesthetic disciplines of Japanese Ikebana flower arrangements or dry, rock gardens.

For his mixed-media artworks, Toru Otani collects vintage printed packaging and building materials such as 2x4s, plasterboard and especially, sandpaper. He cuts and assembles these found materials to create the grounds on which he works with various instruments, mainly colored pencils. The artist isolates details of the pre-printed and patterned materials often found on the back-side, chooses what to reveal, what to conceal and what to connect, and settles on compositions which employ a positive / negative space logic with roots in Surrealism.