Mariko Fujiki Ventura

Mariko Fujiki Ventura was born in Kyoto, Japan of a Japanese Mother and a Jewish-American Father. They resided for three years during that time in the Hakusasonso Garden which was the resident of the renown Artist, Hashimoto Kansetsu.

Her ceramic and visual artworks are landscapes of a childhood seeped in the richness of an environment she has etched in her mind…that is expressed in the shapes and images that come forth in her work.

She earned a BS in Fine and Performance Studies Northwestern University; and an
MA in Education, National Lewis University

Numerous key galleries and museums such as Evanston Art Center have featured Mariko’s work in the past.

During the early 1990s, she became a prominent collaborator in performance and visual art installations directed at the time by Johannes Birringer during his residency at Northwestern University from 1990 to 1997. 

Artist statement:

I am an artist who creates with ceramic sculpture. I have been working with the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effect based on our assumptions of what landscape means to us.

Rather than presenting a factual reality, an illusion is fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination.

My ceramic landscapes establish a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined by its conceiver. These works focus on concrete questions that determine our existence. The works feature coincidental, accidental and unexpected connections. By exploring the concept of landscape in a nostalgic way, I aim to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations.

My works is based on forms that emerge from memory of a childhood in Kyoto. Ancient walls of shrines and temples… landscapes that emulate gardens, raked sand, and mountains and waves surrounding the city of my childhood.

The  collaborations with AlienNation Co. took place in the early to mid-1990s.

Performances

1995   Lovers Fragments, dance-theatre/film performance. Cleveland Performance Art     Festival; Barber Theatre, Northwestern University

1993  Block Gallery, Installation, My Story Began Before I was Born  as part of: 

From the Border, cross-cultural performance-exhibition festival, Josephine Louis Theatre/Block Gallery, Northwestern University

1992   Orpheus and Eurydike, multi-media dance-opera, Josephine Louis Theatre, Northwestern University

Exhibitions (see her artist website)