Tappeto Volante is delighted to announce How long have I been sleeping?, a solo show featuring sculptures and works on paper by New York-based artist Keiko Narahashi.

Narahashi’s work embraces formal elements of modernist design and melds them with tropes found in contemporary craft and folk tales. She explores the principles of painting through clay, using intense colors ranging from primary reds, blues and yellows to deep blues that at times bring to mind traditional Boro textiles or Japanese indigo.

Through the abstraction of nature, Narahashi’s works explore the complexities of life through the lens of the archetypal fairy tale or quest. The landscape she views out of her window facing the Hudson River finds itself in the works as the blues of the sky and water. The dream of water becomes an irresistible impulse that appears in her drawings and ceramics. Likewise, the moon, which she tracks in the night sky, appears to grow larger as it nears the city skyline and enters the human sphere. These fascinations often appear as a combination of simple forms such as circles or contours of the body, referencing the symbiotic relationship between landscape and humans.

The show’s title, How long have I been sleeping?, takes inspiration from a Japanese folktale of a fisherman who becomes enchanted by the underwater world after rescuing a sea turtle. After some time, feeling homesick, he returns to his home only to find that a hundred years have passed and nothing is as he left it.

This selection of Narahashi’s work speaks to her immigrant roots and considers questions of identity, displacement, dualities, and fractures, elaborating the sense of suspension between the dichotomies of her native and adopted land. Here we feel engulfed in a memory or a dream. There is a yearning inside each piece, a longing for both transformations and yet to find oneself at home.