Mail artwork, traditionally discovered within the worlds of zines and conceptual practices, typically resides within the scale limitations of the mailbox. On this sequence of work by Mitsuko Brooks, every part is blown up, giving the symbols and codecs of letterheads and stamps highly effective symbolic energy, reimagined as a tour de pressure. These gestures are elegantly subverted with a fragile steadiness in Mitsuko’s bigger than life work of letters.

Trompe l’oeil stamps are draped on the surfaces of her canvases like artwork hung in a salon, twisting the two-dimensional floor of the portray into cozy decorous rooms for the thoughts to get lost to. Mitsuko is a painter of washed out cityscapes, marbling, calligraphy, and typically even cartography. With these works, she boldly takes on many roles as a grasp crafter, every part from armchair architect to astrologer.

In Mitsuko’s work of letters, an exquisite rigidity emerges between the non-public handmade qualities of snail mail and the mechanized procedural forces of the postal service. With these translations of correspondence to canvas, Mitsuko finds that means between the vernacular specificity of a sure time and place and the liminality and interconnectedness of globalization.

at PAGE (NYC), New York
till March 16, 2024