Courtesy of Miya Ando & Eric Minh Swenson
Curator Michelle Bello was an early champion of Miya Ando’s work back when the artist had her studio in San Francisco’s Hunters Point neighborhood before she relocated to New York City and started showing internationally. Ando’s Bay Area homecoming exhibition happily coincides with San Francisco’s visual arts renaissance featuring two major additions–the eagerly awaited new contemporary arts community Minnesota Street Project and the reopening of SFMOMA.
In Atmosphere Ando will premiere her latest body of work using a pioneering technique and medium of woven silver. This material is made from pure silver fibers woven into a gossamer textile. She then uses a traditional, historic patina to transform the surface of the woven silver fabric to create light-reflecting and ethereal paintings that evoke natural phenomena. Also included in the show are works on steel, aluminum, and wood–which have been painted with chemicals, pigments, or manipulated with heat, sandpaper, dye, ink, and other applied processes.
A descendant of Bizen sword maker Ando Yoshiko Masakatsu, artist Miya Ando was raised among swordsmiths turned Buddhist priests in a temple in Okayama, Japan. Half Japanese and half Russian-American, she grew up bilingually within two distinct cultures, spending her childhood between Japan and Northern California. She apprenticed with a contemporary Japanese master of metalsmith and now combines traditional techniques of her ancestry with modern industrial technology to create abstract paintings and sculptures.
The foundation of her practice is the transformation of surfaces. Ando produces light-reflecting gradients on her metal paintings by applying heat, sandpaper, grinders, acid, and patinas, irrevocably altering the material’s chemical properties. By an almost meditative daily repetition of these techniques, she is able to subtract, reduce, and distill her concept until it reaches its simplest form. For Ando, a practicing Buddhist, the paradoxical pairing of metal with spiritual subject matter is intentional.
“My work is an exploration into the duality of metal and its ability to convey strength and permanence, yet in the same instance, to absorb shifting color and capture the fleetingness of light. It reminds us of the transitory nature of all things in life,” says Ando. “I’m also interested in drawing people into a slowed-down environment, especially in this current accelerated world. My artworks are experiential and shift as one walks around them. The longer the viewer interacts with the work, the more they change.”
The wood panels are inspired by an ancient Japanese metal smithing technique called mokume-gane (wood grain pattern metal). Says Miya Ando, “I modified the panels by painting them with reflective silver nitrate and pigment. The result is an object which occupies a combined elemental state: wood and metal. My interest is in creating harmony between these elements and creating a hybrid of materials which call attention to their natures. The wood grain of the panels is highlighted by the silver nitrate. The vocabulary of the wood grain speaks to time and age; the rings of the wood are a chronology and history of the material.”
Film by Eric Minh Swenson. Filmed at Nancy Toomey Fine Art.
