Light and Slits

oil and acrylic on silk , panel

Light falls equally upon everyone, yet its appearance shifts with the environment and materials it encounters. Sana Onishi's practice centers on the relationship between light, paint, and perception, through which Onishi creates two-dimensional works and installations. Working with paint as a physical substance, Onishi renders visible the behaviors of light — transmission, reflection, and absorption — and reexamines the very act of seeing.

Amid environments saturated with intense stimuli, we gradually forget that we are always in the light. Drawing on the Weber–Fechner law in psychophysics as a guiding thread, this exhibition explores the subtle expressions of light that emerge from pared-down forms and subtle differences in color. The more accustomed we become to strong stimuli, the less we notice change; within weaker stimuli, we grow sensitive to even the slightest variation. Attending to this nature of perception, Onishi seeks to retune the senses through minute shifts — and to reclaim, as a bodily sensation, the nuances of light forgotten amid intense stimulation.

For Onishi, painting is a medium that permanently harbors light. When perception shifts from passive response to active engagement, new connections open up between the world and the individual. No matter the environment, light continues to reach us, changing subtly and ceaselessly —— we are always in the light.

Onishi Sana