Carvalho Park announces the opening of Gospel of three dimensions, introducing the work of Japanese-American sculptor, Mika Obayashi, through a site-responsive installation in the gallery’s 110 Waterbury St. space. Suspended through cotton string, hundreds of handmade sheets of fibrous abaca paper float between floor and ceiling in a delicate, drifting gradient of dark to light indigo. Obayashi invites viewers into this airy, floating matrix, which appears to swell skyward, filtering light through its stratifications like sunlight dappling through trees. Marking the artist’s first exhibition with Carvalho Park, the installation opens the evening of November 15, and will be on view through January 4, 2025.

Absorptive of light and its surroundings, the work expands upon a previous iteration, in which a central, monolithic form could be circumambulated and stepped into on one side. Here, Obayashi has reimagined an ethereal forest through which visitors are led on individual journeys in a metaphysical, gauzy grove of hand-dyed indigo paper—a natural pigment chosen for its “living” character. Simultaneously solid and airy, the layered material is poised with delicate tension between gravity and weightlessness, calling on the rich history of paper as a repository for cultural and ancestral knowledge.

Obayashi first began working with paper during a Japanese paper-making class in her studies, drawing on an ancient craft tradition and prying open a world of material and sculptural possibilities that connects her to her cultural heritage. While living in Japan, she visited paper artisans in their studios, learning the layered history of the medium. She also began noticing what she describes as “sensitive collaborations with nature” everywhere she looked—a synthetic rope or bespoke wooden crutch supporting heavy tree limbs—in which human intervention supports or nurtures other living things in a poetic reciprocity between nature, medium, and necessity.

With this installation, the artist invokes the three-dimensional form as a method of directing a viewer’s experience through space. Obayashi derives the title of her work from Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novella, Flatland: a romance of many dimensions, which traces the exploits of a square in a world that exists only in two dimensions. Conceived as a commentary scrutinizing the hierarchy of Victorian society, the story is narrated by a gentleman square who guides the reader through his realm, illuminating a reality in which women are lines and men exist as polygons. The tale takes a turn when the square dreams of a one-dimensional place in which men are lines and women are “lustrous points”. In waking life, he insists—despite a threat on his life from the powers that be—that the dimension must be real. The square is then visited by a sphere, which moves in and out of his familiar flat plane, appearing as circles of increasing and decreasing size. The square is only capable of comprehending the sphere as a disk, so the sphere takes him to a land of three dimensions. Finally convinced, the square returns to his realm and preaches what he has seen: “The Gospel of Three Dimensions”.

Reading Flatland, Obayashi was fascinated by how the polygon—bearing witness to a sphere traveling through his familiar, flat world—presented a metaphor for spiritual experience. In Gospel of three dimensions, Obayashi merges properties of gravity, light, and movement to summon a space for contemplation, the gradient urging our sightlines skyward. Akin to the transformative process of evaporation, the fundamental essence of the medium is not lost, but transmogrified, permuted from one state to another. Moving through the columns, Obayashi leads the viewer through an elegant, freeform choreography of transcendence. We enter a space in which our own ideas and sense of being in the world resonate in a personal, contemplative reflection. She encourages us to consider new perspectives, discerning myriad impressions of the world that exist simultaneously and offering ways to understand or appreciate one another—even reorienting how we see ourselves.

(Text by curator and arts writer, Kate Mothes)

Mika Obayashi (b. 1995, Michigan) is a Japanese-American fiber and installation artist. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Amherst College, Massachusetts, and is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Expanding her studies, Obayashi was a research fellow in textiles at the Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto, Japan, in 2020. Her first institutional solo exhibition was held at Jewett Art Gallery at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (2022). Additional solo shows include those held with Carvalho Park, New York (2024); LaunchPad Gallery at the Boston Sculptors Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts (2022); Studio Kura, Itoshima, Japan (2020); and with GalleryGallery, Kyoto, Japan (2020). Obayashi is a recipient of the Amherst-Doshisha Fellowship, Amherst College and Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan; the American Craft Council Emerging Artists award; and the Amelia Peabody Award for Sculpture, given by the St. Botolph Club Foundation in Boston; among others. She has received grants from the American Craft Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Residencies include Studio Kura in Kyoto, Japan, and with the Women’s Studio Workshop in New York.