Kahori Kamiya – Sur/Reality at Amos Eno

Featured Artist

Multi-disciplinary artist Kahori Kamiya uses in her sculptures a wide range of materials and techniques to explore oppositions like suffering and healing, beauty and grotesque. Her current sculptures focus on motherhood, especially on breastfeeding.

What is the genesis of this exhibition?

My new works are on-view at Amos Eno Gallery as a part of gallery new member exhibition. This is a dual exhibition, one titled Sur/Reality that I’m in and the other titled Hyper/Reality, both curated by Audra Lambert. The genesis of these exhibitions is the impact of COVID lockdown and our solo shows were postponed up to 2023. Our gallery director and other artists generously gave new members an opportunity to show our works as a “preview”.

Please guide us through the show.

I am showing sculptures and painting. I also performed during the opening reception to wear my sculpture dresses. My current body of work focuses on motherhood and especially on breastfeeding. My nursing time was an extreme experience between pain and pleasure. For women who don’t naturally produce milk, breastfeeding is an every-two-hours sleepless labor that is run in a solitary environment.

In Welcome Back, my large-scale fabric sculpture (2021), I used a hybrid technique, such as sewing, modeling, painting, knitting and embroidering to transform my motherhood gesture/left-over, such as blemish, spilling, scribble, repetition, and stretch marks onto the surface of sculpture.

For the ruffle cave, I sewed Tulle to make a ruffle representing a breast milk shower. This colorful fabric is often used for celebratory occasions, such as wedding parties and baby showers. However, the lightness and see-thoroughness of this fabric evoked in me a feeling of non-substantial existence, such as I felt as if I was forgotten by society when I was on maternity leave.

Related to this work, I created an associated performance that consisted of two nursing dresses that I call Sculp-cou-ture. A black dress that represents my desperate memory of not having any drip of milk. The performance consisted of two parts. The first part was a walk around the gallery and hallway like a sleepwalk to look for the milk and recalling/healing my post maternal time by ringing a bell. The second part was a change of dress inside the sculpture like a “fitting room” which I often needed to use as a nursing room when I was in public due to lack of a place to feed the baby. This new colorful dress expressed one of my best pleasure experiences related to nurturing. After coming out of my sculpture, I cut off a part of my ruffle dress and attached the piece to the sculpture with a long needle.

I’m also showing another sculpture, Football-hold (2021). By stitching thick foam with a long needle, I am re-experiencing my physical suffering during my several mastitis infections to make an abstract shaped breasts.  Because of its function, shape, and sensation I felt as if another troublesome creature existed on top of my chest, and I was even calling my breasts different names. Coincidentally, in Japan, ancient people often nicknamed mountains as “breasts”. It’s coming from the mountain’s shapes and their Animism idea, and also worship of mother nature.

Last, you can view my new painting Nursing Trophy (2021). I investigate social pressure as it relates to nursing. The piece shows a trophy that a mother would receive for nursing, but the trophy is a caricature of an exhausted post-labor mother with features such as stray hair from the chin and sudden dark spots on the face due to hormonal change. This painting will be shown at Radiator Gallery after this show.

All photo courtesy of the artist

Kahori Kamiya was born in Nagoya, Japan and moved to New York, where she received her second MFA in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts. Kamiya works across sculpture, painting, video, and performance. All of her works are rooted in her experiences and traumas. She is a recipient of the Face mask Award from Hudson Valley Contemporary Museum in 2020, the 1st Prize at ANTE Mag in 2021, ISCP Residency Program expecting to start next year, and her work was featured on TV (WMHT Public Media) by Brooklyn Rail critic Robert Shane in 2021. Kamiya has been participating in both national and international exhibitions including Woodstock Artists Association Museum in NY, Van Der Plas Gallery in NY, Oculus Westfield World Trade Center, Carrie Able Gallery in Brooklyn, DIY Cultures in London, Prospect Gallery in Australia, Dumbo Arts Festival in Brooklyn, the 14th Media Art Biennale Alternative Now in Poland, and Pärnu International Film & Video Festival in Estonia. 

Sur/Reality at Amos Eno Gallery, through Nov 14^th, 21; Home Room: live & In Person at ChaShaMa, 11/9-12/6