Thesis Exhibition: March 12 - March 15    

Reception: March 14, 2025, 5-8 pm   

Now, 2024. grandfather clock, glass, chain, metal stand, Babybel cheese wax, fish bone, paper, t-shirts, bamboo. 96 x 18 x 60 inches

(F)utility, 2024. canvas, buttons, metallic thread, graphite, grommets. 18 x 8 x 1 inches

Artist Statement  

Mika Obayashi is a visual artist working in fibers, sculpture, and installation. She combines and arranges everyday objects to make sculptures that are in search of something simultaneously new and familiar. She collaborates with materials to transform them while still preserving their integrity, relying on them as active partners in their own making.

What would it mean to look at things with an anticipatory readiness for wonder, confusion, and excitement? To assume nothing is banal? All objects, discarded, found, encountered, scavenged, are buzzing with their own potentiality. In handling these materials, she recognizes their agential capacity: they command and affect, they connect us with the global forces that led to their being. An object is not just a record of mechanized systems, but proof of the interdependent and necessary relationships between things and people. Her work is a reminder that we feel our way through the world, and it feels us back.

More information about Mika Obayashi at https://www.mikaobayashi.com/.   

All photos credited to the artist.