Artist’s Statement

I am a Tokyo-born artist currently living in New York City. My distinctive works are chaotic collages: amalgamations of found material painstakingly stitched into evocative cross-cultural patchworks. 

My work often employs iconic imagery derived from current and recently discarded popular culture, and sometimes juxtaposes these garish images with fabrics from my personal collection of vintage kimonos that I have carefully complied over many years from the flea markets of Tokyo. 

I often utilize recycled bed sheets, curtains, clothes, and other assorted scrap material into a machine quilted collage, and mix this with traditional quilting practice to transform the separate pieces into the context of contemporary pop art. 

I painstakingly interweave and manipulate preexisting materials of various sources, from high culture to subculture in an attempt to transcend the limitations of the existing material and create a new vision and standard of values with the final work of art. In doing so I blur the meanings of the work from mass culture to a personal view while adding an ambiguous poetic view that constantly creates innovative perspectives that reveal an aspect of our own humanity and my own deeply personal vision of the world.

Artist’s Links

artist’s website:   www.aikijima.com    

gallery links:   www.hilger.at

                       www.franklineparrasch.com