Are we lost again?
Of course, we are
Walking in circles, holding the map upside down, I couldn’t find the painting,
but I came across a taxidermied deer embalmed for eternity in wonderous glass bubbles.
THE MET
Kohei Nawa 名和晃平 Japanese
This taxidermied deer has been transformed through the artist’s application of variably sized glass beads called “PixCells,” a term he invented that conflates the idea of a pixel (the smallest unit of a digital image) with a biological cell. PixCell-Deer#24, perhaps unintentionally, resonates with a type of Japanese religious painting known as a Kasuga Deer Mandala. These paintings feature a deer—the messenger of Shinto deities closely associated with the Kasuga Shrine, in Nara—posed with its head similarly turned to the side and bearing a round sacred mirror on its back.