STATEMENT Kana Tanaka explores light and perception with an innovative use of glass in her sculptures and sight-specific installations. While light is the source of her inspiration, glass is her medium. It is a net with which she captures light phenomena that she finds in the everyday world, and shares that experience with others. Each glass element is made by hand. Each piece is unique. Her tear drops, crystals, or other shaped lenses create fascinating optical effects, such as flipping or distorting an image that is seen through them. Grouped together on suspended wires or mounted to a wall, these installations create an immersive experience designed to create an unexpected shift in the viewer’s awareness. “As I work with glass, I encounter diverse expressions of visible phenomena. These phenomena are everywhere in our daily lives wherever light interacts with glass– windows, household objects and fixtures. When a sunbeam enters a window, it is often scattered by prisms. When a car passes by a window at night, the texture of the glass is projected on the wall with traces of the light patter appearing and then instantaneously disappearing, creating a ‘trigger moment’. My interest lies within these ‘trigger moments’ as they shift awareness within a split second, its images remembered as if suspended in a daydream.” For Kana Tanaka, glass is a lens with which to pull trigger moments out of life and communicate them with others. Believing that there are countless phenomena not yet experienced, she is always searching for new discoveries based on her dialogue with her medium. In her public artworks, Tanaka pays close attention to the environment, its surrounding architecture, ambiance, history, and the community’s needs. Through these projects, she has become increasingly concerned with the challenge of retaining this element of unpredictably and the uniqueness of the viewer’s experience. Tanaka believes that public art must both enhance and become an integral part of the setting. Throughout all of her artworks, she aims to create a dialogue with specific environments, triggering a memory vision or moment of sublime wonder, unique to each viewer. ABOUT As a recipient of artist grants from Pollock-Krasner foundation and POLA Art Foundation of Tokyo, Tanaka has exhibited her work at galleries and theaters in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2002, as well as in Japan and Germany. Born and raised in Aichi, Japan, and now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she continues to expand her career in art with glass and light. In recent years, she completed large-scale permanent public art installations throughout California, as well as in Scottsdale, AZ; New Britain, CT; Spokane, WA; Salt Lake City, UT; and Nagasaki, Japan. Tanaka’s latest art commissions, Flower Trail (2020) at Kaiser Permanente, Union City CA, as well as Petals of Light (2022) at Kaiser Permanente, Scotts Valley, CA, were recognized as Merit Award Winner in the Healthcare Category by the international CODA awards in 2021 and 2022.