Naomi Nakazato Conjures Forgotten Futures at Olympia
Naomi Nakazato, Spirit Duplicator at Olympia (2024). Installation view. Courtesy of Olympia.
The desire imbued in Japanese American artist Naomi Nakazato’s work is palpable, like how your tongue tingles upon entering a candy store or how your skin prickles when a rush of warm air emanates from an open door on a winter day. Crystalline, melt-in-your-mouth mounds break through gridded, layered canvases; in the center of the gallery, an altar-like form comprising wood, aluminum leaf, salt, seaweed, and chrysanthemums emits an alluring glow from an unseen source.
Naomi Nakazato, bua.ni.tasu (mono no aware) (2024). Aluminum leaf on polyurethane, screenprint on plexiglass, wooden base, salt, seaweed, polyurethane, chrysanthemums. Courtesy of Olympia.
In Spirit Duplicator at Olympia, Nakazato reflects on the rites and rituals of mourning. Through repetitive acts of mapping, overlaying, translating, and cloning, she delineates the in-between space of queer and biracial existence, dwelling in its absences and longings. The exhibition asks: Where is desire situated within a body of work? Is it in the artist’s body? In the viewers’ bodies? In the work itself? Is it diffused in the air that fills the gallery? Or is the drive to capture desire in material form a paradoxical pursuit to begin with?
Nakazato’s work evokes Judith Butler’s concept of “grievability.” Drawing on the rites enacted throughout her Japanese grandmother’s funeral, Nakazato attempts to rearticulate unfamiliar practices through familiar materials and forms. As Butler surmises, in order to be mourned, a life must first be made legible. Something that does not exist in the first place cannot be lost.
In the wake of a death, we perform rituals to mark the severing of ties, or perhaps to assert their indestructibility. The performativity of grief, like the performativity of gender, does not make it any less real. But what if such rituals are beyond our grasp? Butler offers the example of the AIDS epidemic that devastated the queer community in the ’80s and early ’90s: Queer love was not culturally or legally legible as such, and therefore the loss of a lover was no loss at all. In Nakazato’s case, mourning the loss of her grandmother is predicated on cultural, and perhaps linguistic, fluency, which her biracial identity complicates.
Transducer (2024) evokes the funerary display of images in its eerie detachment. In place of a portrait, a wooden frame in the center of the canvas holds a mottled black sheet of seaweed, a material that abounds throughout the exhibition due to Nakazato’s grandmother’s encouragement of its consumption. Three listless forms drained of their original color—a bottle, a small jar, and a stone—act as placeholders for vases of flowers or other signifiers of mourning, while clusters of crystallized matter hover ambivalently in the upper corners. An outline of indeterminate terrain falters and fades into the background.
Naomi Nakazato, Transducer (kotsuage) (2024). Screenprint on canvas panel, seaweed on panel, hydrocal. Courtesy of Olympia.
Nakazato’s inscrutable maps and incomplete altars encapsulate the displacement of desire that lies at the core of biracial queerness. The meticulously rendered, diagrammatic surfaces manifest a hunger to resolve a sense of homesickness for places that may not exist or to which one cannot return. In Toe the Line (Koseki ii) (2024), a celestial surface is flecked with minuscule Japanese characters, each relegated to their own segment of an uneven laser-pointer-green grid that intermittently dissolves into emptiness. The work suggests a painstaking attempt to master unfamiliar processes and systems of knowledge that lie just out of reach. Amidst the recent onslaught of headlines announcing moon missions in Prada spacesuits and billionaire colonies on Mars, I find it hard not to let my thoughts drift to the colonization of space as my eye slides across the galactic veneer.
Naomi Nakazato, Toe the Line (Koseki ii) (2024). Polyurethane, acrylic, aluminum leaf, screenprint on canvas panel in artist’s frame. Courtesy of Olympia.
The irreconcilable shifts in scale and perspective bring to mind Hito Steyerl’s 2010 work, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” an exploration of the contemporary prevailing condition of groundlessness. Falling can feel like stasis, if everything around you is hurtling toward the same flattened, infinite, homogeneous place at the same breakneck speed; the raw canvas beneath an indeterminate aerial view and the blurred image pinned to empty space with a single grid line in Flowers for All Occasions (2023) inhabit a barren terrain infused with a prevailing sense of paralysis.
Naomi Nakazato, Flowers for All Occasions (2023). Screenprint and aluminum leaf on canvas panel in artist’s frame. Courtesy of Olympia.
Nakazato’s landscapes lack a horizon line, with which—as Steyerl notes—comes the loss of a “stable paradigm of orientation.” In Toe the Line, one’s gaze floats across gridded aluminum sheen, encountering outsized lunar glaciers and hurdling into shimmering, imperceptible depths. Transducer seems unable to make up its mind whether it inhabits two dimensions or three, portrait view or aerial.
I was left wondering about the translations and imitations that the work underwent in order to be made legible as “art.” While certain material choices reflect a personal process of cultural transference, it is hard to shake the feeling that others are meant to situate the work within the visual discourse of contemporary art spaces. This does not by any means detract from the work’s potency, but rather nuances it, eliciting relational inquiries: What is the role of the public in private rituals of mourning? And which public are we performing for?
The power of Spirit Duplicator lies in its futility. The work speaks in a mother tongue characterized by mistranslations and deletions, syntactical slips and algorithmic errors. Through brittle memorials and uncertain cartography, Nakazato enacts the doubts that dwell in the in-between: Maybe Google Maps knows the contours of my movements better than I do. Maybe if I go through the motions of preparing the right food and arranging the right flowers, it will hurt less. Maybe what I lost was never mine in the way I wished it could be. But maybe the horizon line between us was really only a projection after all.
Spirit Duplicator is on view at Olympia, New York, until November 28, 2024.
