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apature 2004: artists
Kana Tanaka
Kana Tanaka is an installation artist who uses the medium of glass to explore light and optical phenomena and to challenge conventional ways of seeing. Tanaka was born and raised in Aichi, Japan. With an artistic spirit that expressed itself at an early age, she followed her natural inclinations and pursued a Bachelor's degree in Arts and Crafts in 1994 at the National Aichi University of Education in Japan. At this school, she became captivated by the qualities of molten glass and specialized in glassblowing. 
Drawn to the idea of greater artistic openness of the United States, she moved to United States in 1994. At Cleveland Institute of Art, she rounded out her repertoire of various glassworking techniques and pushed herself to develop an independent style. Then in 1996, she was accepted into the graduate program at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island, where she completed her MFA with honors in 1999. It was there that she began to use glass as a medium for emphasizing the experience of light rather than simply producing perfectly formed objects, resulting in a shift to site-specific installations, which involved the viewer in more rich and multi-dimensional ways. Following graduation, Tanaka taught hot-glassworking/sculpture classes at RISD and University of Hartford, while exhibiting her artwork on the East coast. At the end of 2000, she decided to move to California to expand her career in art and large-scale glass works in architecture. While working as a staff artist at an architectural glass firm in Napa, she was awarded an artist grant from Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2001. This grant allowed her to set up a studio space on Mare Island, CA, where she developed her new body of work. Supported by another artist grant from POLA Art Foundation in Japan in the following year, she presented three solo gallery installation exhibitions and collaborated on two public art projects in California. Currently, she is working on two new public art projects awarded this year by Solano County and the City of Davis in California. Her large-scale glass sculptures will be permanently installed in Davis by Fall 2004 and in the Solano County Government Center in Fairfield by January 2005. ARTIST STATEMENT As I work with glass, I encounter diverse expressions of visible phenomena. These phenomena are everywhere in daily life, wherever light interacts with glass: windows, tableware, and fixtures. When a sunbeam enters a window, it is often scattered by small prisms. When a car passes at night, the texture of the window glass is projected on the wall, traces appear in the room, then disappear creating "trigger moments." My interest lies with these so-called "trigger moments" as they shift awareness within an instant as if suspended in a daydream. 
Having grown up in Japan, my concerns are cross-cultural. I have tried to preserve my original ways of seeing while learning to express myself in the language of Western art. I was trained as a glassblower and my initial interests in light began when I noticed how much it affects glass. Light and the perception of it are the dialogical bases for my work in glass. These phenomena are incorporated in my installation pieces. Instead of making simple objects, which the audience observes, from the "outside," I create situations that surround the audience and affect their senses directly and broadly. By means of exaggeration, amplification, distortion and division I intend to generate new perceptions. Viewers become part of the work as they interact with it and observe light. Glass is the net---with which I take the experience of light and share it with others. When I see the reflections of my pieces in my audience's eyes, the communication process becomes complete.
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