Urban Nature as seen by Naoko Ito

My passion is to create environments that involve working with the various characteristics of materials to convey philosophical insights. Specifically, I investigate questions regarding today’s highly technological world and how we operate in/with it. My background as a graphic designer and as the daughter of an architect father steers my art into more three dimensional, contractual, and design related aspects. Using a wide range of everyday materials such as wood, books and wire to create visual metaphors, I have endeavored to make my work poetic and to blur the boundary between beauty and the grotesque. For example, I utilize glass jars for multiple reasons. One is as a metaphor for preserving food, another to typify mass production and consumer culture, still another has to do with recycling. The use of the glass jar itself involves containing, controlling, even forcing a specific condition. My work suggests unseen layers of industrialism, ideology, and globalization. It intensifies the viewer’s experience of the five senses implicitly and explicitly from a new perspective, and by creating contrasts between simplicity and complexity.

I am documenting contemporary issues/scenes and exploring how to make an environment to observe the delicate relationship between nature and technology in contemporary society, to rearrange conventional thoughts and rules, to question rational categorization, and to approach fresh aesthetics in unconventional ways. I have endeavoured to make poetic environments and to blur the boundary between simplicity and complexity that reflect identity and experiences.


Naoko Ito

New York has a lot of parks but I feel like the park is fake nature. I started thinking about how, especially in the New York area, in urban areas, how people get along with nature. How they contain it. - Naoko Ito