Boy and Cat (2014)
Oil
40 x 30 cm
Excursion (2014)
Oil
90 x 50 cm
Nest (2014)
Oil
45 x 60 cm
Promenade (2014)
Oil
60 x 45 cm
Boy and a Bike (2014)
Oil on canvas
155 x 110 cm
Born in Tokyo, Japan and now living in California Motoko Kamada had her art education at the School of Art Institute in Chicago (receiving a fellowship prize in 2004 and in San Francisco (on a Los Angeles college scholarship in 2000). In 2004 she was awarded the George & Barbara Pratt Benefactor Award.
“This body of work is an investigation of my personal history through the lens of a camera my father used to record our family growing up in my native Japan. Other photographic sources for these paintings come from my brother’s more recent documentation of his young family.I have used these photo sources as a spring board to create paintings on canvas that transcend the particular time and place of their origin to speak in a more universal voice creating images that are at once intimate yet anonymous. Using the expressive language of invented colour and interpretive form derived from these fading artefacts, I intend to spur the empathetic imagination and individual consciousness of the viewer”.