NowHere Gallery to Exhibit Works by Yoichiro Yoda
Yoichiro Yoda: The Crossing
Thursday, July 27 through Sunday, August 27
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 27 from 6:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m.
NowHere – 40 Wooster Street (between Grand and Broome Streets)
Admission: Free
SoHo gallery NowHere will host the exhibition The Crossing with recent artworks by New York-based Japanese painter Yoichiro Yoda.
Artist Yoichiro Yoda
About the Artist
Born in Kagawa, Japan, and raised in New York City, Yoichiro Yoda is an artist who is driven by fixations and obsessions. Like a storyteller of mythic tales, he has created an entire cosmology from the topics, places, and people that prey on his mind. This pantheon includes everything from old movie palaces to the stately days of luxury sea travel to George Washington and his legendary deeds to a young woman Yoda met once at a theater years ago. By deploying these things across his paintings—by bringing them to life—Yoda shows us the topology of a world of his own creation.
The Long Room (Fraunces Tavern) by Yoichiro Yoda
Compressing History
In Yoda’s reality, history is compressed, manipulated, and adorned. The eras of silent films and the Revolutionary War live side-by-side here, connected at first by the tenuous fibers of simply being paintings by the same artist. But as we see the work all together, we find common thematic concerns. Nostalgia, for one thing, is prominent. But it’s an uncanny sort of nostalgia in which things feel slightly off, misremembered, or interpreted to the point of being just strange enough that mere sentimentality, a pitfall of much nostalgia, is left behind.
Unique Sense of Humor
Yoichiro Yoda, in some ways, lives in different times at once. His loving offerings to the memories of New York’s grand movie theaters of the past, crossed with his thoroughly contemporary comics work, in which we are treated to his quite unique sense of humor, are both of our era and not. For Yoichiro Yoda, the world is haunted by the ghosts of then and now. Learn more about Yoda at his website.
Space is limited at the opening reception, so please reserve your spot through NowHere’s Eventbrite page.
Eliza’s Birthday Party by Yoichiro Yoda
About NowHere
NowHere is a hub for emerging Japanese artists. The focus of the SoHo gallery is on creatives who come from Japan to New York City, whether for a visit or to stay. They feature work from a broad spectrum of media, from digital to fashion, culinary arts to photography, and everything in between. NowHere is dedicated to building community and expanding their artists’ networks.
NowHere is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. No appointment required.
For more information, please visit NowHere’s website.
Oscar Oiwa to Exhibit METROPOLIS at NowHere
Oscar Oiwa METROPOLIS
Thursday, June 8 through Sunday, July 16
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 8 from 6:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m.
NowHere – 40 Wooster Street (between Grand and Broome Streets)
Admission: Free
SoHo gallery NowHere will host the exhibition METROPOLIS with recent artworks by Japanese Brazilian artist Oscar Oiwa.
Oscar Oiwa has special attachments to numerous cities. These places—Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Paris, and New York—deeply inform his art and the logic behind it. In this exhibition’s large-scale piece Zeus, for example, we see three of these cities writ large by Oiwa. These fantastical versions of each place are rendered, in marker, in hyper-realistic fashion. The proximity between the real and the unreal is the life of the piece, and it reflects the experience of intimately knowing a favorite city, where memory, reality, dream, and geography all collide.
The Olympic games, with their connections to both the ancient and the contemporary worlds, were also a catalyst for Zeus. The games take over a city, present it to the world, recontextualize it, and compel its citizens to reevaluate their hometown. For Oiwa, the Olympics have both positive and negative impacts on their host cities. This ambivalence plays out in his work.
Gods and mascots. In a show that evokes both Zeus, the thunderbolt-wielding patriarch of the fearsome Greek Olympians, and Sam the Olympic Eagle, the cheery representative of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Oiwa levels the importance of the two. We might wonder whether any similarities might exist between them. Is a god merely a form of mascot? Might mascots find themselves elevated to the position of gods? In the art of Oscar Oiwa, anything seems possible.
To learn more about Oiwa, please visit his website.
“Zeus the god of Olympia” ©Oscar Oiwa
About NowHere
NowHere is a hub for emerging Japanese artists. The focus of the SoHo gallery is on creatives who come from Japan to New York City, whether for a visit or to stay. They feature work from a broad spectrum of media, from digital to fashion, culinary arts to photography, and everything in between. NowHere is dedicated to building community and expanding their artists’ networks.
NowHere is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. No appointment required.
For more information, please visit NowHere’s website.