Miya Ando: Sky Atlas

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present Sky Atlas, a series of luminescent works on aluminum by New York-based artist Miya Ando. Growing up between two cultures, Miya Ando grounds her practice in the ephemeral philosophies of the natural world, locating harmony in the gaps between East and West. Harnessing the Japanese notion of mono no aware – an innate sensitivity to the fleeting nature of our world – Ando brings the viewer into a cloudscape that reflects the ways in which we can relate to each other, across the boundaries of language and geography. In an effort to bring attention to the physical manifestation of time, transition, and the cycles of life, Ando selects industrialized materials, blending them with the imagery of nature’s systems of interdependence and impermanence, such as changing seasons, phases of the moon, shifting clouds, and weather patterns. As an allegorical measure of time and natural expression of mono no aware, Ando’s pigmented, aluminum clouds memorialize the wistful, gentle feeling of having witnessed something that is now gone. Inspired by her deep fascinations with arcane Japanese literature, idiom, and philosophy, Ando views her artistic practice as a language that unites spheres of influence, a bridge between her experience growing up in both Northern California and Japan. The titles of her works, as reflected in the Unkai (A Sea of Clouds) and Kumo (Cloud) studies, impart her experience with the lexical gaps between English and Japanese, an expression of translation and difference. Throughout the series of works, bare surface areas on each metal canvas allude to the artist’s open acceptance of voids, gaps in understanding which allow us to find harmony in the inexplicable.

As a call to awareness, the works on view invite us to locate our own means of expression; translating lived experience into a language undefined by cultural disposition. In a rejection of the colonial history of the hegemonic Gregorian Calendar, Ando’s Lunar Spring series recounts the cloud formations and colors at specific times each day of February, March, and April of 2023 in New York City. The flickering and shifting metallics, punctuated with shades of pink, blue, orange, and purple, highlight observations of the changing seasons, serving as both a hybrid calendar and a conceptually cartographic study of a landscape in constant evolution -- the untethered sky. Throughout the exhibition of Sky Atlas, the symbolism of cloud systems, captured through Ando’s photographic field studies and layered ink paintings, offers a visual diary of existence per second, per millisecond, per a measure of time we may not even have the language to describe. Whether human beings, shifting clouds, falling leaves, or lunar phases, we are all interconnected through this fleeting existence. By inviting the viewer into her continuum, Ando reminds us that even in a city, nature is all around us, imbuing our lives with the beautiful and precious ability to observe and experience the present moment.