Chika Matsuda
Chika Matsuda works with sculpture, video, and installation, and often uses found objects and materials. Matsuda’s art practice contemplates the way we live our daily lives, our perception of life, and how we consume and reproduce resources. Her work investigates the relationship between the rational and irrational, and how perception and experience are influenced by language, cultural context, and histories.
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Matsuda was born and raised in Japan. She moved to New Zealand in 2001 and received her B.A in 2006 from Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology. She then moved to the United States and received her MFA degree from the University of Arizona in 2010. Matsuda received the 2008 International Sculpture Center Outstanding Students Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, and 1st place in the Southwest graduate student competition, Crossing 2009. She also received an Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences Graduate Fellowship to the University of Arizona.
Infinitely Reflecting Darkness
​Chika has created two works of art at the Land With No Name Sanctuary. The first piece is a sculpture titled Infinitely Reflecting Darkness, in which she contemplates the nature of existence. In this 2012 sculpture, two mirrors are laminated together face to face. Ted worked with Chika to come up with an aesthetically suitable steel support element that keeps the mirrors stable. Together they aligned it on an east–west plane to connect her Japanese homeland to The Land. Chika looks forward to witnessing the mirrors break into pieces and fall to the ground as time passes, leaving the steel bar to remain.
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Chika also participated as artist in residence at The Land With No Name Sanctuary in May 2015. She worked with performance and video to create Let The Flower Dance You Over Ever Shaky Ground, in which she reacted on a small stage to the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami within her home country of Japan. She incorporated live sound, meditative movement, and interactive volunteers to engage in the work.
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“Our existence today is a continuation of our endless history. The sound we hear today is a reverberation of the past, and the sound we make today echoes to the past. The words come out from our mouth are the words said before us. I am working on a series that involves video, sculpture, and drawing to demonstrate words as an eternal vibration and of the mortality within our human condition.”
Let The Flower Dance You Over Ever Shaky Ground
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