Exhibition: Ian Miyamura 2025

Meaning in painting is like a spider. It might hide under a piece of something, waiting to be revealed in the act of overturning. Maybe it has been there, in the corner of the room, for days. Clearly and plainly. I like when it lowers itself onto a shoulder, silently going long moments until it is discovered—then with a start! Or never fully is. The only thing being felt—along the sides of the mind—are those nearly invisible wisps... like impossibly small corridors of wind.

The artist is an insect. It is an inheritor of a complex environment in which it must find a way to navigate, one among many others. Because successful navigation largely depends on when, when not, and how to be seen, insects have developed behaviors that can be looked at as strategies of defense. Some choose to quietly blend into their surroundings, mimicking a twig or a leaf. Others pattern their wings with the faces of that which makes prey out of their predators. (The best defense is a good offense). Interestingly, there exist behaviors that are self-defeating and end up encouraging unwanted attention. Then there are those performed in the total absence of a threat. What this confusing logic between one and the other might reveal is that the insect’s prime interest is in fact compulsive industriousness not as self-preservation, but as a means of assimilation into its environment—one that is now devouring by its nature. Where the self is and is not.

A spider is not an insect. Unlike the insect, the work that it occupies itself with—the weaving of its web—is fully contingent on whether or not another walks into it—and in what way. Most simply, the web either ensnares, or it does not. But this is a poor way of looking at things. In actuality, the web is all: it is at the same time marvelous and knowable. It is a trap, indeed. And so it is a tomb—to both the spider and its other. It is also a network of lines between points. It is a support. Yet it is not there, it is covered in dust, it is made new each day. —Ian Miyamura, December 2024

Ian Miyamura (b. 1991 Kailua, HI; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013, and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2019. Solo exhibitions include Chaos Spawn, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Bureau at the Paris Internationale, Paris, France (2023); OCTOBER 31, 4th Ward Project Space, Chicago, IL, 2022. Group exhibitions include My Condolences, M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 2023; A Tournament of Lies, The Wassaic Project, Wassiac, NY, 2022. In 2021, Miyamura attended MASS MoCA’s artist residency program as a fellowship recipient. In 2022 he was awarded a FST Studio Projects Fund grant. He is a recipient of the Luminarts Cultural Foundation of Chicago Fellowship (2013), as well as the LeRoy E. Hoffberger Foundation Fellowship (2017). This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.