KEIKO NARAHASHI

MIRROR AND MESSENGER

ON VIEW NOVEMBER 15, 2025 — JANUARY 3, 2026

CARVALHO announces Keiko Narahashi’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery, mirror and messenger — its title originating from a book of poems by Kostas Anagnopoulos, prepared in collaboration with the artist and released on the occasion of Narahashi’s solo. The installation comprises a series of sculptures that extends Narahashi’s longstanding fascination with water as a metaphysical threshold — a site of crossing, of disappearance, and of return. mirror and messenger opens the evening of November 15, with the artist in attendance, and is on view through January 3, 2026 at CARVALHO’s 110 Waterbury Street gallery.

What Narahashi offers is not representation but distillation, revealing what is elemental both in grief and in humor. The sculptures in mirror and messenger hold something larger than their size — a vastness compressed into single, declarative forms. A head without a body. A trio of tilting sails. A disc that could be the moon, or the last ripple before a figure disappears beneath the surface. Each object is at once simple and strange, familiar and unplaceable, animated by a logic that borrows from both folklore and dream.

To step into the gallery is to enter a terrain of apparitions. Heads hover as rounded mounds rise from three oval plinths like spectral islets, each containing its own constellation of forms. Everything feels mid-gesture: present yet unmoored, as if each sculpture has arrived from elsewhere, crossing a boundary we can sense but not see. Suspended above these quiet assemblies is a mirroring plane, compressing air into significance, the void between them charged with potential crossings.

Narahashi’s forms emerge from an imagination steeped in myth and the supernatural. Faceless heads on a tiered platform recall the Noppera-bō of Edo-period ghost lore – blank-visaged spirits whose eeriness lies not in violence but in the quiet shock of erasure. In the gallery, however, they are watchful rather than threatening, as if tasked with holding the unspoken rather than haunting it. Their anonymity becomes a vital space: a site of openness, projection, and continuity. Other works, more discernibly figurative, evoke haniwa guardians and Jizō statues – humble figures connected to burial and protection. The sculptures feel both ancient and startlingly present, relics of a world both ours and not.

This coupling of gravity and gentleness runs throughout the exhibition. Narahashi’s objects act like found spirits yet often suggest animated characters: vessels with distinct personalities. One sculpture bears the title the sail has no return address, an almost comic lament that hangs in the air. Elsewhere, a work resembling an island balanced above a large persimmon introduces a lighter humor, a nod to gentler Japanese tales of transformation and mischief. Its improbable equilibrium, both tender and absurd, reveals Narahashi’s interest in how the worlds of the living and imagined coexist in fragile harmony, as well as her instinct for finding levity within the supernatural. Even at their most playful, however, the sculptures possess a kind of emotional density — not heavy, but resonant. This tonal interplay is felt between sculptures: the air between them alive, as if they are in mid-conversation or about to stir, holding pose and pause like punctuation in an otherwise invisible sentence. In this, Narahashi occupies the delicate seam between body and spirit.

Keiko Narahashi (b. 1959, Tokyo, Japan) received an MFA in Painting from Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, and her BFA from Parsons School of Design, New York. Institutional exhibitions include those at the Art Institute of Chicago; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Sheppard Contemporary Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno; Kuhn Fine Arts Gallery, Ohio State University, Marion; The College Art Gallery, The College of New Jersey; Educational Alliance, New York; Dumbo Arts Center, New York; Dallas Center of Contemporary Art, Texas; Visceglia Gallery, Caldwell College, New Jersey; Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles; Bard College; Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York; and Usdan Gallery at Bennington College, Vermont. The Whitney Museum of American Art holds an editioned work by Narahashi in its permanent collection. Gallery exhibitions include those held at CARVALHO, New York; Tappetto Volante Projects, Brooklyn; Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York; David B. Smith, Denver; Jason McCoy, New York; Assembly Room, New York; 106 Green, Brooklyn; Kate Werble Gallery, New York; A.I.R. gallery, Brooklyn; and Lehmann Maupin, New York. She was a recipient of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Studio Grant, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant in Painting. Reviews include those in The New Yorker, Artnet, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail and The New York Times.