Curatorial Statement
This exhibition is a portrait of the ways we absorb and process the landscapes of home. Moments of anxiety, gratitude, claustrophobia, and recognition become islands to navigate within a domestic topography. Linda and Miku’s contrasting ways of relating to home and place, with either anxiety and reticence, or curiosity and acceptance, give way to kindred repetitive processes that reflect each one's contemplative sensitivity and responsiveness to materials. Cycles of family mirror the cycles of nature, continually transforming the contours of our understanding of how we relate to place and each other.
-Cassie Stone
This exhibition is a portrait of the ways we absorb and process the landscapes of home. Moments of anxiety, gratitude, claustrophobia, and recognition become islands to navigate within a domestic topography. Linda and Miku’s contrasting ways of relating to home and place, with either anxiety and reticence, or curiosity and acceptance, give way to kindred repetitive processes that reflect each one's contemplative sensitivity and responsiveness to materials. Cycles of family mirror the cycles of nature, continually transforming the contours of our understanding of how we relate to place and each other.
-Cassie Stone
Linda Sanchez
Artist Statement
Sanchez develops her work by observing, understanding, and absorbing her environment, transforming it onto the surface in a context where everything is unstable.
Sanchez is always collecting, accumulating, and repeating. Among those moves, to follow the sounds of the tools is key. It is to hear the process of each material – metal, ceramics, textile, wood, stones – converse about possibilities.
Bodily postures accompany each material, a feminine and masculine energy, that manifests in the process. Every material imprints its character and responds to each of the elements of its surrounding – air, fire, water – in a forceful way. The metal always remains, melts, and starts again. The ceramic connects with the earth in a fluid, delicate, and fragile way. Sewing, embroidering, smelling become meditative actions that invite peace, and help to address the silence.
The material evinces its voice in the process, nothing is permanent, what is constant is change, cycles, time are lessons of nature. The object gives life to the instants. It is death that recalls life.
-Linda Sanchez
Miku Saeki
Artist Statement
"The daughter's "independence" may mean keeping her distance from her mother by living with her partner and, at the same time, returning to her parent's home from time to time to take care of her mother-daughter relationship to prevent feeling guilty about leaving her mother." - Koichi Takaishi (Daughters Who Support Mothers, 1997)
My current studio practice is a process of analyzing one’s own frustration toward traditional mother-daughter relationships from the daughter's perspective. It is something many women often feel, although it hasn't been discussed enough. Mother-daughter relationships are exceedingly distinct from other family relationships, like mother-son or father-son relationships, and it is hard to be understood by men or women. This "platonic incest" relationship, as psychoanalyst, Caroline Eliacheff, described it, is a lifelong fight of codependency, guilt, and de- selfing for daughters. I reference my personal experiences and psychoanalytic research, yet my practice isn't trying to find a solution or to understand the relationship and flaws. My practice forms an acknowledgment.
The work engages the intimate relationship between mother and daughter, arranging them into familiar and domestic visual installations and objects with repeated forms. Often those forms are the size of a palm or smaller and folded like containers. While various materials (such as fabric, copper, brass, beads, silicone, pantyhose, etc.) are used in practice, the process is consistent. There is an obsession with repeating the same method of making that creates the space to observe and question. The repeated pattern overlaps with the inescapable relationship cycle that I'm personally in with my mother, called "Inefficient dance by countermoves" ( Harriet Lerner Ph.D., The Dance of Anger, 1985). It is when one person in the relationship changes a behavior, and the other person gets intimidated or threatened by the other person's new level of assertiveness, then acts cold or disregards others. Making a change would make one feel guilty, so eventually, nothing improves and repeats the same pattern. The series of works take on forms that are often abstracted.
The placement, scale, and weight of my installations symbolize and reference tension, naiveness, and pressure. Stress plays an especially significant role in my work. Metal has weight and coldness, and fiber and pantyhose have lightness, flexibility, and stretchiness. By pairing them up in my work, I create some sort of tension, stress, and oddness in my work, possibly making the audience sense a similar feeling I experience daily in the mother-daughter relationship.
Miku Saeki
Biography
Miku Saeki (b. Tokyo, Japan) is an object maker who works with mixed media. She is currently based in Detroit, Michigan. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Contemporary Crafts from Columbus College of Art and Design (2017). She is attending Cranbrook Academy of Art to complete her Master of Fine Arts degree in Metalsmithing. Her practice acknowledges the complicated bond between mother and daughter from the daughter's perspective in both installation and wearable formats. Her exhibitions include "Young Hearts Juried Exhibition" in Columbus,OH, where she placed Best of Show, "Fresh Looks 2021" in Ypsilanti, MI, and Fabric Softener in Tokyo, Japan.
Artist Statement
Sanchez develops her work by observing, understanding, and absorbing her environment, transforming it onto the surface in a context where everything is unstable.
Sanchez is always collecting, accumulating, and repeating. Among those moves, to follow the sounds of the tools is key. It is to hear the process of each material – metal, ceramics, textile, wood, stones – converse about possibilities.
Bodily postures accompany each material, a feminine and masculine energy, that manifests in the process. Every material imprints its character and responds to each of the elements of its surrounding – air, fire, water – in a forceful way. The metal always remains, melts, and starts again. The ceramic connects with the earth in a fluid, delicate, and fragile way. Sewing, embroidering, smelling become meditative actions that invite peace, and help to address the silence.
The material evinces its voice in the process, nothing is permanent, what is constant is change, cycles, time are lessons of nature. The object gives life to the instants. It is death that recalls life.
-Linda Sanchez
Miku Saeki
Artist Statement
"The daughter's "independence" may mean keeping her distance from her mother by living with her partner and, at the same time, returning to her parent's home from time to time to take care of her mother-daughter relationship to prevent feeling guilty about leaving her mother." - Koichi Takaishi (Daughters Who Support Mothers, 1997)
My current studio practice is a process of analyzing one’s own frustration toward traditional mother-daughter relationships from the daughter's perspective. It is something many women often feel, although it hasn't been discussed enough. Mother-daughter relationships are exceedingly distinct from other family relationships, like mother-son or father-son relationships, and it is hard to be understood by men or women. This "platonic incest" relationship, as psychoanalyst, Caroline Eliacheff, described it, is a lifelong fight of codependency, guilt, and de- selfing for daughters. I reference my personal experiences and psychoanalytic research, yet my practice isn't trying to find a solution or to understand the relationship and flaws. My practice forms an acknowledgment.
The work engages the intimate relationship between mother and daughter, arranging them into familiar and domestic visual installations and objects with repeated forms. Often those forms are the size of a palm or smaller and folded like containers. While various materials (such as fabric, copper, brass, beads, silicone, pantyhose, etc.) are used in practice, the process is consistent. There is an obsession with repeating the same method of making that creates the space to observe and question. The repeated pattern overlaps with the inescapable relationship cycle that I'm personally in with my mother, called "Inefficient dance by countermoves" ( Harriet Lerner Ph.D., The Dance of Anger, 1985). It is when one person in the relationship changes a behavior, and the other person gets intimidated or threatened by the other person's new level of assertiveness, then acts cold or disregards others. Making a change would make one feel guilty, so eventually, nothing improves and repeats the same pattern. The series of works take on forms that are often abstracted.
The placement, scale, and weight of my installations symbolize and reference tension, naiveness, and pressure. Stress plays an especially significant role in my work. Metal has weight and coldness, and fiber and pantyhose have lightness, flexibility, and stretchiness. By pairing them up in my work, I create some sort of tension, stress, and oddness in my work, possibly making the audience sense a similar feeling I experience daily in the mother-daughter relationship.
Miku Saeki
Biography
Miku Saeki (b. Tokyo, Japan) is an object maker who works with mixed media. She is currently based in Detroit, Michigan. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Contemporary Crafts from Columbus College of Art and Design (2017). She is attending Cranbrook Academy of Art to complete her Master of Fine Arts degree in Metalsmithing. Her practice acknowledges the complicated bond between mother and daughter from the daughter's perspective in both installation and wearable formats. Her exhibitions include "Young Hearts Juried Exhibition" in Columbus,OH, where she placed Best of Show, "Fresh Looks 2021" in Ypsilanti, MI, and Fabric Softener in Tokyo, Japan.