Maetake is known primarily for her sculpture and installations; central to this exhibit, INHERENT will be a series of her new bas-reliefs, which will cover the walls and ceilings of the gallery as compositional elements. Maetake calls this series, “Printed Oxidation on Fiber Relief,” which showcases unusual methods that produce bright, textured wall pieces created from transformed handmade papers by exposing them to metal corrosion, thus producing expressive hues of turquoise and reddish-brown residues. The synergy between the objects and exhibition space direct the viewer’s focus to both the artwork and architecture through emphasizing the artist’s distinctive materials

Influenced by methods used in Washi-making, the artist works with beaten mulberry bark as well as cotton linters and adorns the works with various patinas, which are often sourced from the industrial waste products from Maetake’s finished sculptures. Unlike the constant disintegration on such scraps, Maetake attempts to embed their ceaseless erosion deep into the handmade paper through the fiber’s hydrogen-bond; thereby, transforming a patina into a permanent material. In this ever-industrial and waste producing society, every object Maetake chooses to use is exploited to its utmost point, which accelerates this depleting cycle. Maetake says, “I view color not only as a surface of perception but as a physical substance.”

Installed on the ceiling and continuing down the walls, one of her pieces consists of a very light steel-frame within layers of the fibers. By purposely using these concrete objects, Maetake expresses a material’s physical presence in flux as it changes from one expression to another in its spatial aspects so that it withstands being captured by the viewer’s gaze. Maetake conjures various associations ranging from natural to industrial imagery and architecture: an implication metaphorically representing the artistic production life-cycle itself, translated into a statement of political and ecological configurations to be contrasted with images of our fast-paced modern life. All of these transient qualities in Maetake’s work suggest that the effects of time on artworks and human creation are explored as vital components of organic, natural processes.

Maetake’s work has been exhibited extensively in the US and abroad at venues including: Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam, Netherlands; New York; Espacio 1414, The Berezdivin Collection, Puerto Rico; Queens Art Museum, Queens, NY; and Fredric Snitzer, Miami, FL; as well as The Chimney, Brooklyn. Maetake has received The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture and has been a resident artist in the studio of El Anatsui in Ghana with a research grant from the Agency for Japanese Cultural Affairs. Maetake’s work has been reviewed in publications that include: Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, FlashArt, Time Out NY, Artsy and others. She was a Featured Artist to give a presentation along Posthuman Aesthetic research at 3rd Posthuman Global Symposium at NYU held by the Philosophy Department. She earned her MFA from Columbia University, and is an adjunct faculty of the Fine Art Department at FIT. She currently lives and works in Queens, NY. She is originally from Tokyo, Japan.