Subaquatic Homesick Blues
2019
New Orleans, Louisiana
Kaori Maeyama's urban landscape paintings explore obscured vision, allure of the ordinary, and sense of movement in static images. A mash-up of wabi-sabi and serendipity, her work amplifies the passage of time and the atmosphere of place. Born and raised in Fukuoka, Japan, Kaori arrived in New Orleans alone with one duffle bag in 1994. After studying filmmaking at the University of New Orleans, she documented jazz funerals and produced slice-of-life video clips for the film collective Timecode:NOLA. While working as managing producer and audio editor for the public radio program American Routes, her focus shifted from digital production to analog image-making, and she studied plein air painting with Phil Sandusky at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. Her work has been shown at Staple Goods, The Front, LeMieux Galleries, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and reviewed in Gambit Weekly and Pelican Bomb in New Orleans. She holds an MFA in painting from Tulane University, where she learned to paint without paint brushes.
Joan Mitchell Center Residency, 2020
New Orleans landscape has been my primary subject matter throughout my career. By painting in the streets of New Orleans, I learned to see beauty within the mundane and broken, and how memories and cultural background play a significant role in visual perception.”