Chicago Works: Mika Horibuchi

How does a painting blur the line between art and object? Chicago Works artist Mika Horibuchi explains the tricks and slips in visual perception seen in her work during a tour of her studio.

TRANSCRIPT

I’ve been thinking about edges of paintings as indicators of how we think about frames and framework, where an image stops and begins.

There’s a fake shadow that goes on, so this bottom part is much darker.

It makes it into more of an object, in a strange way.

So I’ve been looking for different duck-rabbits, and then taking that illustration and then turning them into physical rubber stamps. And then, painting the stamp.

All of my paintings are presenting themselves as objects in one way or another.

Even with the watercolor paintings.

My grandmother, who lives in Japan, wanted to learn how to paint and draw.

And she’s never painted or drawn in her whole life.

I sent her some watercolors and basic brushes.

And then a few months later, she sent me these photographs in the mail.

Photographs of the paintings that she’s done become source material for a series of paintings that I started.

It’s paintings playing the role of objects. That screens, and curtains, too, aren’t meant to be looked at, rather, our inclination is to look through them.

It teeters back and forth this–these two realms of being both an image and an object or one or the other.