Nobuho Nagasawa is a remarkable public artist whose most recent project was designing and installing part of the Birds Motif at the new Soto Metro Station in Los Angeles.
To read my first OEN article featuring images of Nagasawa's works, click here.
Ms. Nagasawa describes her
art this way:
"My work ranges from site-specific projects to installations and public art. I
create an interactive space that is informed by the actual place -- its
history, people and spatial narrative. This approach requires detective-like
investigation and quasi-archeological research, exploring sociological and
psychological aspects of each site. Immediate physical and social context
influences the form, content, and choice of materials and media.
I see my artist's identity as inevitably "hybrid" in my case, part sculptor,
journalist, poet, architect, and urban designer. Materials and methodology
follow upon the necessary diversity of evolving concepts as a project reveals
its conditions. I see this process as an excavation of meanings cultural,
geopolitical, social, personal that lie hidden within the materials
themselves. By revealing personal memories, collective histories,
unacknowledged myths, and contradictory issues, I try to open up key social and
personal reserves that can galvanize public interaction. Art, after all, has
the power to deconstruct the blockages of social energy and serve as a catalyst
to new vision and public self-discovery. My goal is to create artwork that provokes
and revives a site and wakes people up to the poetry of place.
I am intrigued by the
sense of scale, both human and civic, and how relatively small changes can
enhance private experience within the public setting. A truly livable space
should stand the test of time. It spurs social communication and inspires
reconstruction. When history is brought to the surface through public art, it
can serve as source for the renewal of cultural identity and the evolution of
social values.
My goal is to create works that attract people to possibility where and as they
live. The development and realization of art in public is a dialogue with a
place and its time land and substance, its past, its people, the future they
create made new, immediate, and somehow timeless.
Nobuho Nagasawa"
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Ms. Nagasawa, Her Project, and The Soto Station, in progress:
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Inside Soto Metro Station, Shortly Before Opening:
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"Art, after all, has the power to deconstruct the blockages of social energy and serve as a catalyst to new vision and public self-discovery. My goal is to create artwork that provokes and revives a site and wakes people up to the poetry of place."
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Words in double quotation marks and all the images above are presented courtesy of Artnet's Artist Works Catalogues. To view the picture of the artist at its source, click here.
