OFLUXO

Below Grand is pleased to present Naomi Nakazato’s exhibition To Raise a Blister Afar, her first solo exhibition  with the gallery. Nakazato’s exhibition examines the mechanics of the shrine along with its function in crystallizing medial belonging outside of racial binaries, non-fluency, and geopolitical ruptures. By using the gallery as a telescoped experience of pilgrimage and homecoming, Nakazato considers how momentary places of ritual can simultaneously tether one’s self to place and obliterate imposed orientations.

 

To Raise a Blister Afar functions as a space to conjure a simultaneously singular and ambiguous identity; by eschewing the worship of individual deities or the utilization of traditional architectural tropes of Eastern and Western reliquaries.  The installation suggests fuzzy articulations–an act of subversion in which the parameters of racially identifying can be mercurial and even irrelevant. In venerating the ineptitude to articulate and mime source, boundaries and normative expectations give way to subjective and deeply personal histories.  As a result, the slippery grasp on belonging within in-between worlds can then be heralded as a kind of sacred, cogent faith.

 

Compositionally, the installation presents the ritual of reconciling dichotomous narratives through abstract associations and a syntax of fragments–mostly through symbols of the natural world. Organic and artificial materials are used in tandem to reach for this reconciliation; while remaining transparent of their inept fusion. Housed ephemera of distorted field studies, repaired castings of natural objects, and typefaces of voids all obfuscate their origin and seek to revere inexperience as faculty. Through the repeated rituals of reproducing, arranging, and archiving objects and images, imperfection in iterations becomes standardized and a glitchy conduit to present something that is holistically formed.