Hiromi Nakatsugawa at Franz Kaka

Artist: Hiromi Nakatsugawa

Exhibition title: Pass By

Venue: Franz Kaka, Toronto, Canada

Date: June 16 – August 13, 2022

Photography: LFdocumentation / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Franz Kaka, Toronto

Hiromi Nakastugawa recounts a moment in the early summer of 2021 when they would regularly lay on the grass to stare up at the sky. “I would see the usual – floaters, a bright spot where the sun would be. I then started seeing small circular lights aimlessly flying around. I’ve never seen them before, so I checked if it was some natural light, or something in my eye … They were not the shadows of small flies, the flight patterns would be more erratic if they were, so I narrowed my hypothesis to something supernatural, something spiritual. I remember that these orbs were profoundly beautiful. They induced the feeling in me that they were like small spirits, communicating with me. Looking back, it’s funny to imagine myself with tears streaming softly, attentively staring at the sky.”

Nakatsugawa’s debut solo exhibition Pass By explores the complex modes of being that exist within a single body at any given moment. Their highly rendered drawings visualize multiple states of transformation, appearing as energetic flows travelling across internal communicative networks. Expressing an emergent form of biomechanism that finds precedents in both the sculptural work of Lee Bontecou and drawings of HR Giger, Nakatsugawa’s drawings conjure a wide range of science-fictive associations, with references to the figure (internal) and landscape (external) persisting throughout.

Intimately scaled and accomplished in pencil crayon and graphite, their renderings of tubed and venular passageways weave through, around and across one another illuminating an intricate mesh of organic operations and their functional fragility. Within these structures portals form and disperse, activating potential processes of internal discovery and otherworldly exploration.