Brent Nakamoto: April 2020
Brent Nakamoto: April 2020
Originally from the California Bay Area, I received my BA in Art from UC Santa Barbara in 2012, and my MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in Saint Louis in 2018. I moved to Pittsburgh, PA at the end of 2018. I have exhibited my work here both in solo exhibitions and group exhibitions through the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. I currently teach at the Community College of Allegheny County and Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media.
My creative process is influenced by my study and practice of Zen Buddhism. For the past several years, I have been trying embrace the ethos of the Zen arts—discipline, patience, and non-attachment—within a Western context of making and looking at images. In my photorealist paintings, based on an archive of personal and family photographs, I’m interested in image-making as a way of finding detachment from—rather than attachment to—the painted subject. Erasure or effacement acts as a distancing device, which challenges the conventions of portraiture and our relationship to the painted subject. In, November 9, 2016 (One Thousand Cranes)—a series of 1,000 photographs, each depicting one of 1,000 origami cranes folded from the New York Times from the day after the 2016 Presidential election—I’m incorporating time and repetition as a way of representing the meditative process.
