michele kishita
Seasonal WANDERING
April 1, 2021 – May 19, 2021
Crossing Art is pleased to present Seasonal Wandering, the solo show by Philadelphia-based artist Michele Kishita. Featuring more than a dozen brilliantly colored paintings created by the artist at her studio since 2014 to now, this exhibition demonstrates Kishita’s deep exploration of the dialogue between the wooden surfaces on which she paints and the trees from which those panels were built. Kishita paints exuberant and chromatic works, using wood as the material and starkly divisional color compositions which express extensive features of nature that gradually evolve over time. The works in this exhibition capture life’s transience and show Kishita – who is sensitive to the time and keeps inward feeling of kindness always. She anoints every ending moment as a new beginning and celebrates nature’s enduring power and its salutary presence in our topsy-turvy lives.
Kishita lived in Japan for a long time because the cultural fascination. After moving back to the United States, she started her art career, specialized in Japanese prints. She still visits her family-in-law in Japan frequently during the recent years. Her works are strongly influenced by the graphic stylizations and compressed spaces of Japanese ukiyo-e prints. The combinations of various colors create a livening pulse of highly vibrant atmosphere and subtly classical style. As Kishita’s practice on wood surface matured, this material began to play a powerful role in shaping her own approach to the broader theme, opening up a new sense of lifeforce and an embrace of her inner peace.
Kishita’s inspiration for her paintings comes from the traditional Japanese aesthetic and Haiku poem. The trees, mountains, rocks, flowers and water jointly constitute the landscape in her eyes. Like the wood grain’s undulations, which mark the tree’s growth and annual water intake, record a tree's experiences and are a historical account of the landscape itself. These paintings offer us an ode to the beauty of nature with imperfect, impermanent and incomplete rhythms. At the same time, there is a kind of controlled artifice in her works as well – the landscape is not just a landscape, it is also a place to accommodate the existence and release of the human body, and to find self. Kishita strives to conjure the landscape that no longer exists but is inherently contained in each panel while expressing the visual contrast and harmony where human-made structures and nature intersect. This show invites the audience to experience the cycle of seasons visually and mentally, following with the colored fragments choreographed by Kishita. Pause your life, and just wandering aimless in our earthy space, feel what you should feel.
Artist Bio
Michele Kishita is a Philadelphia-based artist who uses landscape as her primary subject. She received her M.F.A in Painting and B.F.A. in Fine Arts, Painting and Drawing (with honors) from The University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Kishita has exhibited her works in more than 30 shows around the world. Kishita’s paintings are in a number of private/corporate collections, including Toyota, Capital One, and Kaiser Permanente, and her work is featured in Create Magazine, on the Poetry Foundation blog, and the Studio Break and Thyme in the Studio podcasts, as well as in several literary journals. She has participated in artist residencies in New Mexico, Russia, and Iceland and exhibited at the Sharjah Art Museum in the United Arab Emirates and the Museum of Non-Conformist Art in St. Petersburg, Russia.
