WHEN:
July 8 - August 10, 2025
For more information visit the Tappeto Volante Gallery website.
WHERE:
Tappeto Volante Projects
126 13th Street
Brooklyn, NY
A spokesperson describes the event as follows:
“...new body of work that blurs the boundaries between sculpture and installation. Positioned on an elevated platform that extends across the floor and up the wall, the works unfold against a pale gray backdrop—staging a quietly dramatic terrain where forms appear to move in secret alignment, tethered by a nearly invisible geometry.
The exhibition draws its title from the enduring cultural motif of longing and imagined escape, as evoked in iconic songs like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz and “Somewhere (There’s a Place for Us)” from West Side Story. Narahashi channels this sense of in-betweenness through her sculptural language, shaped by the experience of navigating multiple cultural and geographic identities. Her works exist in a state of suspension—poised between transformation and belonging—infused with a quiet, persistent sense of yearning.
The formal language of Minimalism—flat planes, geometric restraint, and objecthood—is present throughout the exhibition, but softened and animated by narrative and emotional depth. Narahashi’s sculptures appear to perform rather than simply exist: leaning, stretching, and teetering in careful proximity. Their theatrical arrangement emphasizes the relationship between body and environment, and how memory and imagination are shaped through material space.
Recalling the delicate balance and performative intimacy of Alexander Calder’s Cirque Calder, Narahashi’s installation conjures a sense of intimate drama. The central platform offers a stage-like point of view, inviting the viewer into a composed scene. Unlike traditional theater, the audience is free to walk alongside the stage. As one moves around it, hidden structures and supports reveal the quiet engineering behind the poise. What seems flat gains depth; the backs of the works, glazed in deep matte black, stand in stark contrast to the vibrant chromatic surfaces that face forward. This passage from “somewhere” to “elsewhere” suggests a poetic shift—from color, dream, and lightness to a more grounded, structural reality. Narahashi’s process begins with drawing directly into slabs of clay, treating the material as a cut-out sketchbook. She constructs hybrid forms that occupy a space between vessel and picture plane. Surfaces are activated through layered glazing and repeated firings, creating painterly effects that oscillate between intention and chance. Her forms suggest silhouettes, portals, or fractured landscapes, always hovering just outside of legibility. A tension between abstraction and representation threads through the work, grounding it in both formal precision and emotional resonance..."
