Natalia Nakazawa

Visual Description: The depicted building structures are inspired by the multi-locational visual storytelling methods used in miniaturist and manuscript paintings - where multiple views are included in a single plane. Persian miniature paintings unfold without the framework of conventional western 1-point perspective, allowing the viewer to place themselves at a variety of scales and locations.

Curatorial Description: Visual Heteroglossia is a series exploring disparate ways of image making - contrasting organic wood grain patterns with intuitive orthographic architectural forms. The building structures are inspired by the multi-locational visual storytelling methods used in miniaturist and manuscript paintings - where multiple views are included in a single plane. My panels serve as accumulation points for materials from the past, present and future. They are speculative spaces, where I can simultaneously live in multiple time periods and tell a story across a variety of perspectives. In the Visual Heteroglossia series, I explore the orthographic architectural configurations often found in manuscript and Persian miniature paintings that unfold without the framework of conventional western 1-point perspective, allowing the viewer to place themselves at a variety of scales and locations. Heteroglossia, a concept developed by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, describes the presence of and conflict between different types of speech and perspectives (characters, narrators, author, etc) as the driving force behind a powerful story - the birth of the contemporary novel. I seek to embody this - bringing together disparate elements from my daily life in the form of photographic transfers, alongside textiles, hyper-pigmented acrylic inks, and laborious hand-laid gems.

Visual Description: Our Stories of Migration details human movement through art object and storytelling. The tapestry shows a map of the world with strands of yard that workshop participants included demonstrating their ancestral, present, and future paths onto the surface.

Curatorial Description: Our Stories of Migration details human movement through art objects and storytelling. Participants are invited to embroider their own ancestral, present, and future paths onto the surface of a world map tapestry, which has been constructed with digital images mined from the site-specific museum collections. Each image highlights a different object from the collection that embodies historical moments of cultural exchange. Whether these exchanges take the form of material goods gathered from a trade route or culturally specific images taking on a new meaning in a different land - Our Stories of Migration encourages critical engagement through personal and cultural histories. Additionally, visitors draw their own maps - which are continuously added to an animated archive - and write responses to the prompt question: "What does it mean to be a global citizen?"

Visual Description: The collage on a wooden panel is presented in four parts. Four wooden panels are hung together, with less than an inch apart, showing an image of a vessel. The vessel is broken and put back together as in Kintsugi technique, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery, but it is fixed with black rhinestones to represent black gold. The vessel has many handles symbolizing multiple generations holding the vessel together.

Curatorial Description: A Soil Thick with Promise’s title is excerpted from pleasure theorist Adrienne Maree Brown’s poem be careful, i am fertile, and alludes to the radical importance of pleasure in confronting personal and collective transition and loss, and in creating and experiencing art. The title also directly references soil as the source material for the clay vessels on display. Natalia first started making small vessel paintings while working from home and grieving lost family members during the pandemic lockdown, “haunted” by this shape and its multiple associations: history, domesticity, burial rituals. Natalia eventually began to translate this form into flat ceramic objects, finding pleasure and social connection in the material’s tactile and utilitarian nature. Yet the two-dimensional vessels serve more as signposts than functional containers, suggesting the impossibility of retaining everything of value. –Text written by Katherine Gressel

This vessel painting depicts a multi-handled shape - implying multiple generations of people would be required to pick it up.

Visual Description: The colorful tapestry is made of three digitally printed fabrics that depict repeated outlines of vessels and ten inherited linens, out of which seven smaller ones are cyanotypes that the artist dyed with a small village community in Uruguay.

Curatorial Description: Poemas para Myriam / Poems for Myriam was made in response to the passing of my Uruguayan abuela in September of 2020. I was invited to participate in a residency in Uruguay, called Campo Garzon and during this time I created these collaborative cyanotypes with local families as an homage. My abuela was an educator, and so many of her students were part of her daily constellation - so it felt very connective to make artwork with others on linens and cloth napkins that I had inherited from her and my partner’s grandparents.

About

Natalia Nakazawa (b. 1982, Charlotte, NC) is a Queens-based interdisciplinary artist and educator working in painting, textiles and social practice. A child of Latin American (Uruguayan) and Asian (Japanese American, sansei, 3rd generation) diasporas, her work is deeply in touch with multi-generational cultural legacies. Natalia’s community-driven projects explore ideas of transnationality, cultural identities, storytelling, archives, and patterns of migration. Blurring the boundaries between education, activism, and art making, each of her projects is based in collaborative processes, inviting participation and collective imagining. In her jacquard textiles series, the artist pulls images from the online open access collections with a focus on objects that embody historical moments of cultural exchange. Nakazawa’s work encourages critical engagement with personal histories, utilizing the familiar, warm format of the tapestry as a means of creating objects that can be simultaneously comforting and disruptive. Natalia received her MFA in studio practice from California College of the Arts, a MSEd from Queens College, and a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has recently been exhibited at Kunsthal Extra City (Antwerp, Belgium), Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), Arlington Arts Center (Washington, DC), Transmitter Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), The Cleveland Institute of Art (Cleveland, OH), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Lafayette College Galleries (Easton, PA), and The Old Stone House in Brooklyn (NY). Natalia has been an artist in residence at The Children’s Museum of Manhattan, MASS MoCA, SPACE on Ryder, Wassaic Project, Facebook AIR, Interlude Artist Residency, CAMPO Garzon, Triangle Arts Association, and Wave Hill Winter Workspace. Her work is included in institutional collections: The Rockefeller Foundation, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and Meta.