Gabriela Galvan Rojas & Yuko Oda
September 8, 2006-October 7, 2006

the:artist:network is pleased to present “Stranger Than Fiction” featuring installations and works by Gabriela Galvan and Yuko Oda in a two-person exhibition curated by Mariko Tanaka. 

Gabriela Galvan’s site-specific installation, “The Invisible Paradises” uses appropriated materials such as shopping bags, brand name consumer products, and advertising of her surrounding environment in downtown Chinatown and SoHo.  Employing their designs, saturation of colors, vis-?-vis branding, and graphic advertising within her cutout assemblages, Galvan transforms the space into a high-octane visual playground.  Galvan’s constructions swell from the floor to the ceiling.  Illuminated by pink flashing lights, the work allows the audience's imagination to explore the creative associations between oft-ignored objects in today's world and her luminescent fantasy. The collected objects take on new meaning through her re-ordering. Immersed in over-saturated visual signage, Galvan’s work imposes questions about the contemporary habit of consumption.

Concurrent to her concerns for the current climate crisis and a sustainable ecosystem, Yuko Oda transforms disposable byproducts of this system into new life forms.   Using ordinary everyday objects such as plastic bottles and sponges, she creates perfectly sculpted fields of clear plastic flowers and neon-colored, wire-mesh insects into cultivated environments that explore concepts of fertilization, birth, and the cycle of existence.   Through her study of plants and insect behavior, and by subtly manipulating disposable materials, Oda constructs flowers to grow out of the gallery room floors, beckoning the viewer to observe her strangely eerie and mysterious forms of nature.   Often times playful and whimsical, her work holds a phenomenon of nature vs. the artificial, simulated world through her use of constructed materials.

Gabriela Galvan (1974)
Born in Mexico City.

Her artistic practice has included the usage of drawing, sculpture, installation, and video to build artistic pieces sometimes tiny ones that have become complex and elaborated spatial interventions.
She studied Visual Arts at the National Center of Arts in Mexico City and has exhibited her work at Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum, Siqueiros Public Art showroom; and Carrillo Gil Art Museum,  National Museum of Sciences  and Arts (MUCA) Roma in Mexico City.
International exhibitions have been displayed in The Mexican Cultural Institute, New York; The:artist:network, New York; Piano Nobile Space, Switzerland; Osola Art Center, Italy; K?nstlerhaus Bethanien, Germany; Reina Sofia National Center of Arts Museum, Spain; Apeejay Media Gallery, India; La F?brica, Spain; and the Osaka Sky Building, Japan.

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Yuko Oda (1975
Born in Tokyo, Japan
 Yuko Oda is a Japanese artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been exhibited in New York and Tokyo including shows at Stay Gold Gallery, The Artist Network, and the Art Addicts Fair during Scope 2004. Oda obtained her MFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002, and was a resident at the School of Visual Arts in 1999.

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