Each work made by Brooklyn-based artist Misaki Kawai forms part of a grand microcosmic creation. Drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, and video complement one another in Kawai's colorful, chaotic installations; miniature cars, boats, aircraft, dwellings, and alien landscapes are peopled with a motley cast including cultural icons, robots, animals, and the artist herself. Lovingly (and raggedly) cobbled together from craft materials, Kawai's teeming environments declare a consciously childlike sensibility. In her recent large-scale installation Space House , John Lennon lives on, languishing in a diminutive jacuzzi while watching television, a minuscule remote at his side; somehow, this impossible situation seems not only feasible, but utterly natural.

Raised in Osaka, Japan, Kawai learned the art of needlework from her mother, a professional seamstress and puppet maker. Her knowledge of traditional craft practices intersects with a lifelong investment in pop figures and hippie heroes, lending her work its postmodern bite. A visit to Kawai's studio, currently flooded with brightly saturated paintings of varying shapes and sizes, reveals a budding interest in portraiture. Some of these new images represent stock American personae: a young sailor with eyes both vacuous and friendly or a pinup girl with legs spread and small yellow cats playing about her thighs and ankles. One larger work features Kawai's rendition of Jackie Chan, with an oversized, longhaired lapdog hovering at his feet. Typical of Kawai's work, this fantastical combination pushes even the most major of celebrities out of orbit.

-SK