Gospel of Three Dimensions

CARVALHO PARK announces the opening of Gospel of Three Dimensions, introducing the work of Japanese-American sculptor, Mika Obayashi, through a site-responsive installation in the gallery’s 110 Waterbury St. space. Suspended through cotton string, hundreds of handmade sheets of fibrous abaca paper float between floor and ceiling in a delicate, drifting gradient of dark to light indigo. Obayashi invites viewers into this airy, floating matrix, which appears to swell skyward, filtering light through its stratifications like sunlight dappling through trees. Marking the artist’s first exhibition with CARVALHO PARK, the installation opens the evening of November 15, and will be on view through January 4, 2025.

Absorptive of light and its surroundings, the work expands upon a previous iteration, in which a central, monolithic form could be circumambulated and stepped into on one side. Here, Obayashi has reimagined an ethereal forest through which visitors are led on individual journeys in a metaphysical, gauzy grove of hand-dyed indigo paper—a natural pigment chosen for its “living” character. Simultaneously solid and airy, the layered material is poised with delicate tension between gravity and weightlessness, calling on the rich history of paper as a repository for cultural and ancestral knowledge.

Obayashi first began working with paper during a Japanese paper-making class in her studies, drawing on an ancient craft tradition and prying open a world of material and sculptural possibilities that connects her to her cultural heritage. While living in Japan, she visited paper artisans in their studios, learning the layered history of the medium. She also began noticing what she describes as “sensitive collaborations with nature” everywhere she looked—a synthetic rope or bespoke wooden crutch supporting heavy tree limbs—in which human intervention supports or nurtures other living things in a poetic reciprocity between nature, medium, and necessity.