Two of Akira’s digital prints were purchased by the City of Seattle for their portable art collection.
“The City of Seattle owns over 3,000 portable artworks in its Civic Art Collection and has been collecting for over 40 years. These artworks will enter the Seattle Public Utilities Portable Works Collection managed by the Office of Arts & Culture. They will be displayed throughout city galleries and offices.”
Red Lines, Digital Mixed-media, 2018
My Muslim Neighbor, Digital Collage, 2019
Film by Alessia Rauseo featuring the music of Lard Dog.
Ellie has a knack for spouting out stream-of-consciousness word groupings when she is expressing herself. For giggles, I turned them into band names.
Moroccan Cubes
Rushing To Nothingness
Medusa’s Ass
Potato Dermotologist
Revenge of The Bento Box
A logo we designed for Lake City Collective. The logo incorporates the iconic Lake City Arch and the mission of the collective to serve and empower underserved communities.
I didn’t venture far from the apartment. Roads and sidewalks are icy, so you look for sure-footing on crunchy snow where dogs defectate. I took the kids to the nearby playground at St. Alphonsus Church. It’s a destination we frequent year-round. To walk familiar routes over and over again may seem monotonous, but there is always the chance to find novelty if you are attuned to it. Xavier de Maistre journeyed around his room feeling that staying put was far more convenient than the hassles of travel. As Alain de Botton said in The Art of Travel, “The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
The kids enjoy walking in frozen tire ruts and seeing the water move underneath. Their masterful ability to be present is what we lose as adults. Adults search, spend money, attend retreats, become addictive and clingy in order to experience fleeting presence.
I am in my head a lot these days. I seek action to avoid silence, opinions to comfort uncertainty. Yet these are delusional tactics to avoid my 48-year old self. To find nothing in the silence is terrifying to me. Is there a difference between “nothing” and “nothingness?” The former may be about a deficit, the latter about abundance.
After two years as Seattle Drawn, Akira will be showing a collection of his digital drawings from 2016-2018 at the Everett Community College Russell Day Gallery. Akira’s work is a meditation on the changing landscape of Seattle. The opening reception is Thursday, November 8th, 12:30-2:30pm. The Gallery is open Monday through Thursday 10am to 4pm and Friday 10am to 2pm.
I am experimenting with a new visual language that clusters memory. My recent trip to New Orleans has helped me move forward in my work. Brice Marden has used the term “glyph” to describe a symbolic language. I am thinking about my work in the same way.
In New Orleans, I visited the New Orleans Museum of Art and had the pleasure to see the work of local and regional artists. One artist truly inspired me and I decided to email him and thank him. As an emerging artist, his response has helped me:
Thank you Akira Ohiso for sharing your work. I hope at some time to see the real pieces. Anyway, keep in touch and in mind, being an artist is like running a marathon. Slow and steady. Like good wine, it takes time in developing an authentic voice.
