August 2021
Curated by Victoria J. Fry

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Maiko Kikuchi was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. Influenced by her psychoanalyst father, she became interested in the boundary between dreams and reality. When she was little, she started creating based on the idea of making “visible daydreams”. She received her B.A in Theater Arts and Fashion Design from Musashino Art University in 2008, and soon after, she moved to the United States to study fine arts, receiving an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Pratt Institute in 2012. Her desire to broaden the expression of her daydreams led her to the theatre field in 2013. At that time, she began cultivating her career as a theater artist with her first object theatre piece “Daydream Anthology” performed at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Since then, she’s been presenting her performance pieces at many New York theaters including The Public Theatre, LaMaMa, Japan Society, HERE, Dixon Place and others. As a visual artist, her work has been included in an online exhibition “Finding Sanctuary” presented by Visionary Art Collective. Other group exhibitions include at Ca’d’Oro Gallery (NY), Parasol Project (NY), HERE Art Center (NY), Jamestown Art center (RI), CITAN (Tokyo), WWW(Tokyo) and more.

Maiko Kikuchi also works as an animator committed to musicians and bands and has created music videos, album cover designs and more for artists in both the U.S. and Japan.

Website: www.maikokikuchi.jimdofree.com

Instagram: @maiko_kikuchi_nyc

ARTIST STATEMENT

My consistent theme of creation is making visible daydreams. The first time I created my daydream was at my father’s old office. I was 4 years old. My father is a psychoanalyst, and at that time, as part of his therapy practice, he had a big wooden box filled with sand and tons of miniature figures displayed on a shelf in his office room. That was there for a type of children’s therapy called “sandplay therapy” a method by which the doctor works to analyze a child’s unconscious thoughts by observing the miniature world they create with the toys on the sand landscape inside of the box. Every time I went to his office, I was focused on making my little world inside of that box. The elements there were all the elements of the real world but, depending on how you placed them, the world became unusual and that made me imagine all the different stories behind them. When it was time to clean up and we had to go home, the sand world felt like it had been a dream.

That experience greatly influenced me in my creative process. I often imagine what if the elements of my daily life turned into something unreal like the way I created my imaginary world at my father’s office? I didn’t expect that I would experience some actual surreal moments, however, until this pandemic happened.I remember the first time I went out from my apartment during the early days of the lockdown. Streets were empty and quiet, but I could feel people inside of their houses, so all the buildings looked like huge quiet creatures watching me passing by them and that made me feel as if I was caught inside of the sandplay box. Since my daydreams are based on my imagination inspired by the elements in my ordinary life, all the works I am presenting in this exhibition are the reflection of my days of confinement during these past 12+ surreal months. They consist of unsettledness, isolation, and a bunch of little joys and hopes during the confinement.