Chie Fueki: Petal Storm Memory

This exhibition, Petal Storm Memory presents a body of work by the artist Chie Fueki, a painter who was born in Japan, raised in Brazil, and came to the United States for her college and graduate art education. She lives and works in Beacon, New York with her husband, the painter Joshua Marsh. The paintings and drawings on view are complex both technically and philosophically. The work deals with issues of place, memory, and longing. Through a laborious and unique process that is more like cinematic montage than the pictorial process of collage, Fueki complicates notions of landscape and portraiture by intimating the ways that time and memory can simultaneously distort and rectify the ways in which we build and maintain memories of places and people — and of memory itself.

In the artist’s own words:

“I aim for radical hybridity and co-existence. In my paintings I synthesize the materials that I collect through an ornamental language. I experienced such hybridity in traditions like the Candomblé; a spiritual blend of West African and Roman Catholic beliefs and rituals. The irreconcilable contradictions between the Cathedral, the Carnaval, and modern city in Brazil continues to drive my engagement with the universal languages that constitute our collective unconscious. One where the ghosts of Western art history, Japanese animation, South American mysticism, Ukiyo-E prints, Christian symbolism and artifacts from our daily, contemporary experience can float in a state of suspended animation.”