NADA MIAMI 2025

NADA Miami 2025

Western Exhibitions will present recent work by two artists new to our roster, painter and cartoonist Nanako Kono and ceramic sculptor Olivia Zubko, along with selections from a 2022 body of work by long-time gallery artist Edie Fake.  All three artists transform tangible imagery from everyday life with idiosyncratic approaches to materials and techniques, navigating language, intimacy, the body and identity while pointing to new avenues for empathy, understanding and joy.

Plotted out beforehand using graphite pencil, rulers and protractors, and hand-painted with the illusion of hard-edged precision, Edie Fake’s artistic practice mines the grammar of architecture to carve out space for bodies that have been othered and invalidated by dominant systems of knowledge. Fake’s abstract representations of community form and collapse, cohere and dissipate, reflective of the real experience within queer lives and their ever-shifting constellations, while centering his central concern for the audacity of queer utopian imagining. The compositions for this 2022 body of work are reliant on the logic of Tarot card design and draw inspiration from the spiritual diagrams of Emma Kunz, fabric patterns and perfume bottles. Bold, graphic line work and luminous color gradation of these new works conjure up an Ernst Haeckel botanical illustration set in stained glass.

Nanako Kono’s paintings, drawings, prints, comics and collages investigate miscommunication. Kono is inspired by the structure of comic strips, employing intrinsic elements of that format — panels, speech balloons, animated objects, recurring characters, text — in her humorous paintings. Her process of learning English as a second language sparked an interest in translations and semiotics, leading to the realization that the signs, symbols, and words we choose often fail to convey intended meanings to others. Taking visual and material cues from the Chicago Imagist tradition, Kono’s work explores a playful new way of communication.

Olivia Zubko employs cast replicas of fixtures and found materials to create sculptures that are meant to evoke personal memories and associations with the intimate spaces of private environments. The pieces often take form as compound objects, made up of both vague and familiar elements from the bathroom and other domestic landscapes. The objects reproduced and manipulated in the work are significant in their role in daily ritual, designed to be lived with and touched or utilized every day and, in a way, become extensions of the body. Zubko focuses the nuanced relationship between these objects and the body, as well as the broader dynamic between the individual and the domestic sphere of private space and personal intimacy. Through gentle gestures in porcelain and stoneware, Zubko seeks to evoke that which is simultaneously strange, beautiful, and perhaps as awkward as the body itself.