Karen Shiozawa
I work primarily through painting while recently expanding my practice into moving image and spatial forms. My paintings begin with personal experiences of light, sound, and unstable moments of perception. During childhood, while living in the Netherlands, I encountered diffuse light, reflections on water, and endlessly flat horizons that profoundly altered my sense of distance, memory, and time itself. Architectural motifs such as windmills, classical arches, and church spires repeatedly appear throughout my work. Through contrasts of light and shadow, layered surfaces of color, and subtractive gestures that scrape away at the image, I seek to evoke spaces transformed through memory rather than depict physical landscapes themselves. Scratches, particles, and diffused traces of light remaining on the painted surface are not intended to visually reproduce scenery, but to retain tactile sensations and traces of time within the image. In recent works, I have extended this painterly perception into moving image and spatial compositions. Through subtle fluctuations of light, texture, duration, and space, I attempt to create environments that drift between lived experience and recollection. My practice is rooted in quiet and ambiguous moments — reflections on water, warm light, distant horizons, or the sensation of recalling a place that cannot be fully remembered. Within contemporary perception shaped by digital information and fragmented memory, I am interested in how intimacy, slowness, and emotional depth can still be preserved.