The following works are available for purchase here
以下の作品はこちらからご購入いただけます
https://yugen-gallery.com/ja/artist/kahori-maki/
グラフィックアーティスト牧かほり。自身初となるオールドローイングによる展覧会「Where is Alice? - アリスはどこに?」。
"一枚の絵から立ち上がるプロダクト、スペース、&ワーズ"を制作の核として活動する牧かほりは日本大学芸術学部卒業後にアメリカに渡り、ニューヨークでファインアートを学びました。帰国後イラストレーターとして活動を開始し、これまでに広告はじめファッション、スポーツブランドのテキスタイル、企業やホテルなどの空間デザインまでを手がけています。画家の父を持ち、幼少の頃には絵で生きていくことを決意。生花の先生である母の影響から現在の作品に通じる花や植物など「華やかでエネルギッシュなものを描くことが多かった」と話します。
根本では墨の濃淡などモノクロームの世界に惹かれると話す牧。今、国内外で知られる観る者の細胞を活性化させるようなビビッドな牧の世界観は、東日本大震災がきっかけで生まれました。「多くの人が優しいものや華やかなものを求めていて、明るい世界を描きたい」と思い、南国に咲く大きなシェイプの花を思わせる作品を描くようになります。作品を特徴づける曲線は花や植物のそれに惹かれ、表しているとも話します。
そんな彼女が今回発表するのはドローイング。「2年前の緊急事態宣言で画材屋も印刷屋も閉まるなか、アトリエにあるものだけで制作をしなければならず手元に大量のクラフト紙だけが大量にあった。本来は作品保護の為に使う薄紙に鉛筆でドローイングをもくもくと続けてきた」ことが本展につながります。
また大判サイズの作品をプリントすることが叶わず、アトリエのプリンターでA3サイズに絵を分割して出力し、それらのパーツをランダムに繋ぎ合わせていると思いもよらなかった一枚絵が浮かび上がることに気づきます。明確なイメージに向かって描くのではなく、カラダを動かして出てきたものをつなぐ、手を動かすなかで現れる世界に反応するように描く牧の制作スタイルは、壁面コラージュという新たな手法に至ります。
「風景を愛でつつ、塗りつつ、離れてみては謎を解きつつの日々」に誰もが感じてきた不安を抱きながら、ただただ手を動かす中で生まれてくる曲線の重なり。その重なりが見せる新たなシェイプは牧に新たなモチーフとして浮かび上がってきました。
「世界的な感染症蔓延を目の前に、私たちはどこに向かうのだろうという不安と模索の中で、今まで描いてこなかった目や瞳を意識するようになり、自然と生きものや、生きものらしきものを多く描くようになりました」
これまで明確に意思表示することは苦手で、目を描くのも好きでなかったという牧。緊急事態の期間、これまで描いてこなかった人の顔や目が強烈に浮かんでくるようになったと話します。その左右の目はどれもアンバランスに描かれ、牧はそれを"現実を見る目"と、"自らの内面を見る目"とします。
また線の重なりが見せる時空間に牧自身が没入するうちに現れた生き物を象徴するのが、うさぎでした。それに誘われるように制作が進み、以前にもテーマとして取り組んだことはあったものの未完に終わった不思議の国アリスの世界観にたどり着きます。牧にとってドローイングは、アリスを探す日々となったのです。
本展では2年間描き溜めたものと描き下ろし作品に加え、ギャラリーの壁一面を使って会場設営の際に直接ドローイングをする壁画作品も登場。これら約30点には牧の作品の特徴でもある曲線から抜け出すように現れた鳥やうさぎ、そして誰も知らない、でもどこかには存在するらしきものが描かれています。
空間デザインを多く手がけ、「空間から絵を発想する」インスタレーションも得意とする牧ならではのドローイングの曲線の連なりはアリスらが円になって回るレース"コーカス・レース"にも重なり、会場ではアリスの世界へ滑り落ちるかの没入感が得られることでしょう。
不条理な世界に思いがけず滑り落ちてしまうことを、今私たちは至近に感じています。行く先々が変な場所で、出会う誰もが理解しがたい言動をとる動物ばかりのアリスの世界は仮想の世界なのか?
「創作には無限の可能性があり、人はこんなにも世界を新しく作ることが出来る」。それを示すことがアーティストの使命だと話す牧。当たり前だと思っていた生活がひっくり返る中でも手持ちのもので模索し、それでも「大量に作品が出来た」という牧。その姿はシャレにならないことばかり起き、人生がふつうのやり方で続いていくと思うのがいかにナンセンスなことかと思い至ったアリスと重なります。そして、アリスとは私たち自身であることに気づかされるのです。
新しい生活様式や価値観を探る今、現実世界とは区別されたパラレルワールドとしてのメタバースが盛んに言われています。現実のあらゆる制限を乗り越えられるかの仮想世界からすれば、現実世界はなんと効率が悪く、進みが遅く、曖昧なことか。現実と仮想の世界を覗く私たちアリスはどこにいて、どこに向かうのか。
アップルやAdobe Systems inc.とのコラボレーションもするなど、これまで全ての作品をデジタルフィニッシュしてきた牧が、いわば解像度の低い鉛筆のドローイングで新しい世界を見つけ出したことも示唆に富みます。
現実に目配せをしながら、自身の内面をよくよく覗けばnowhere(どこでもない)の世界が現れる。牧かほりがアトリエで紙と鉛筆だけで探し当てたその新しい世界とは、now here(今いる、ここ)であることも語りかけてきます。
本田賢一朗
Graphic artist Maki Kahori will be holding her first all-drawing exhibition, "Where is Alice?".
Maki's core work is "products, spaces, and words that emerge from a single drawing.
After graduating from Nihon University College of Art, Maki moved to the United States to study fine art in
New York. After returning to Japan, she began her career as an illustrator and has worked on advertising,
fashion, textiles for sports brands, and space design for corporations and hotels. With a father who is a
painter, she decided at an early age to make a living by painting. Influenced by her mother, a flower
arrangement teacher, she often painted "gorgeous and energetic things," such as flowers and plants, which
are similar to her current works.
Maki says that at the root of her work, she is attracted to the world of monochrome, such as the shades of ink. Maki's vivid worldview, which is now known both in Japan and abroad as something that activates the viewer's cells, was inspired by the Great East Japan Earthquake. She began to paint works reminiscent of largely shaped, tropical flowers, saying, "many people are looking for something gentle and glamorous, and I want to depict a bright world." Maki further explains that the curves that characterize her work are drawn to and represent those of flowers and plants.
The drawings she will be presenting this time are of the same type. "Two years ago, when the state of emergency was declared and all art supplies and printing shops were closed, I had to work only with what I had in my studio, which was a large amount of kraft paper. I continued to draw with pencil on thin paper, which was originally used to protect the works," Maki explains the story that led to this exhibition.
Also, unable to print large-size works, she found that when she used the printer in her studio to print out her drawings in A3-size portions and then randomly joined these parts together, a single picture emerged that she had never expected. Maki's production style, in which she does not draw toward a clear image but connects what comes out by moving her body, and draws as if responding to the world that appears as she moves her hands, has led to a new technique called wall collage.
Overlapping curves started to emerge as she simply moved her hands with the anxiety that everyone has felt in the "days of loving the landscape, painting it, and trying to solve the mystery by moving away from it." The new shapes that these overlapping curves create have emerged as a new motif in Maki's work.
"In the face of the global spread of infectious diseases, I was anxious and searching for where we were headed, and I became aware of eyes and pupils, which I had never painted before."
Maki says that she has never been good at expressing her intentions clearly and has never liked drawing
eyes.
During the emergency period, she began to see intense images of people's faces and eyes that she had never
drawn before. Maki describes them as "eyes that see reality" and "eyes that see their own inner selves."
Creatures began emerging as Maki immersed herself in the time-space created by the overlapping lines, forming the symbol of a rabbit. This led Maki to the world of Alice in Wonderland, which she had previously worked on as a theme but never completed. For Maki, drawing became a daily search for Alice.
In this exhibition, in addition to the drawings Maki has made over the past two years and new works, there will also be a wall painting, in which Maki draws directly on the entire wall of the gallery while setting up the exhibition space. These 30 works depict birds and rabbits that seem to escape from the curves that characterize Maki's work, as well as things that no one knows, but that seem to exist somewhere.
Maki, who has designed many spaces and specializes in installations in which she "conceives of a picture from a space," has created a series of curves in her drawings that overlap with the "caucus race," a race in which Alice and her friends spin in a circle, and the audience is transported into Alice's world. The audience will feel as if they are slipping and sliding into Alice's world.
Now we are blissfully close to slipping unexpectedly into an absurd world. Is Alice's world a virtual world, where every place she goes is a strange place and everyone she meets is full of animals that say and do incomprehensible things?
There are infinite possibilities in creation, and people are capable of creating so many new worlds. Maki says that it is the mission of an artist to show this. Even as her life, which she took for granted, was turned upside down, she searched with what she had on hand, and managed to "create a large number of works." This is much like Alice, who realized how nonsensical it was to think that life could go on in the usual way. And we realize that Alice is all of us.
As we explore new lifestyles and values, there is a lot of talk about metaverse as a parallel world that is distinct from the real world. How inefficient, slow-moving, and ambiguous the real world is from the virtual world, which seems to be able to overcome all the limitations of reality. Where are we, Alice, who look into the real and virtual worlds, and where are we headed?
It is also insightful that Maki, who has collaborated with Apple and Adobe Systems inc. and has finished all of her works digitally, so to speak, has found a new world in low-resolution pencil drawings.
While keeping an eye on reality, a world of nowhere appears if one looks closely into one's own inner world. The new world that Maki found in her studio using only paper and pencil is "now here."
Kenichirou Honda
【YUGEN Gallery web site】
https://yugen-gallery.com/ja/artist/kahori-maki/