June 8th - July 16th, 2023

Oscar Oiwa (ACC 2001) has special attachments to numerous cities. These places—Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Paris, and New York, deeply inform his art and the logic behind it. In this exhibition’s large-scale piece Zeus, for example, we see three of these cities writ large by Oiwa. These fantastical versions of each place are rendered, in marker, in hyper-realistic fashion. The proximity between the real and the unreal is the life of the piece, and it reflects the experience of intimately knowing a favorite city, where memory, reality, dream, and geography all collide.

Elsewhere in this exhibition we are greeted with the avatars of a modern pantheon—various Olympics mascots from the past. These playful, temporary icons, omnipresent during the life of the Olympic years each of them represent, fade from the collective memory once the games have ended. In Oiwa’s work, they are resurrected and reconfigured; made abject and absurd.

Gods and mascots. In a show that evokes both Zeus, the thunderbolt-wielding patriarch of the fearsome Greek Olympians, and Sam the Olympic Eagle, the cheery representative of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Oiwa levels the importance of the two. We might wonder whether any similarities might exist between them. Is a god merely a form of mascot? Might mascots find themselves elevated to the position of gods? In the art of Oscar Oiwa, anything seems possible.

METROPOLIS is being presented at NowHere, a multipurpose hub for New York City-based Japanese creators from across all disciplines.

For more information, click HERE