| reina_kubota_cv.pdf |
Reina Kubota is a Brooklyn-based visual artist. She graduated with both BFA & MFA from Aichi University of the Arts, Japan. There she learned how to sculpt in the most classical sense. Upon graduation, she moved to New York and has continued exploring her works. She truly spent the early years of her life living and breathing art. Over the years she became interested in giving form to abstract ideas like trust, love, death and identity.
Currently her interest is shifting to the cultural gaps, gender and the environmental transformation. She has exhibited the interactive installation work at Dumbo Arts Center 2010, solo show at ISE cultural Foundation 2010, installed the public art at Riverside Park South in Manhattan 2013-2014 and participated in numerous group shows both in NYC and Japan.
"As humans we exist through our emotions. Happiness and melancholy, despondency and anger; love. We cannot see any of these things, nor can we touch them, but they are nonetheless essential to our experience. It is because of the ubiquity and invisibility of emotion that I am motivated to translate formlessness into form. Not only as a means of artistic expression, but as an attempt at exploring and challenging universality, as well as varying cultures’ interpretations of universal symbols. I have chosen our internal organs as a parallel to our emotions because they are invisible to the everyday eye, and at the same time integral to our existence.
I was classically trained in sculpture, and though I have moved away from the rigidness of formal instruction, my understanding of myself, my fellow humans and the emotions that define us is best represented as statues and statuettes, figures and figurines. My creations are grown not only from internal organs, but common objects that arouse within viewers both communal images and personal anecdotes. It is through this medium that I hope to inspire people in my native Japan and my adopted country of the United States to ponder their perception of certain symbols, as well as those elements considered most important in their lives."
Currently her interest is shifting to the cultural gaps, gender and the environmental transformation. She has exhibited the interactive installation work at Dumbo Arts Center 2010, solo show at ISE cultural Foundation 2010, installed the public art at Riverside Park South in Manhattan 2013-2014 and participated in numerous group shows both in NYC and Japan.
"As humans we exist through our emotions. Happiness and melancholy, despondency and anger; love. We cannot see any of these things, nor can we touch them, but they are nonetheless essential to our experience. It is because of the ubiquity and invisibility of emotion that I am motivated to translate formlessness into form. Not only as a means of artistic expression, but as an attempt at exploring and challenging universality, as well as varying cultures’ interpretations of universal symbols. I have chosen our internal organs as a parallel to our emotions because they are invisible to the everyday eye, and at the same time integral to our existence.
I was classically trained in sculpture, and though I have moved away from the rigidness of formal instruction, my understanding of myself, my fellow humans and the emotions that define us is best represented as statues and statuettes, figures and figurines. My creations are grown not only from internal organs, but common objects that arouse within viewers both communal images and personal anecdotes. It is through this medium that I hope to inspire people in my native Japan and my adopted country of the United States to ponder their perception of certain symbols, as well as those elements considered most important in their lives."