Tuesday Evening in Downtown Brooklyn: Opening Reception for Harumi Yamada's "The Daydreamer's Sketch" at Ouchi Gallery

This evening we took the G and A trains to Jay Street/Boro Hall and then walked up Jay Street, past NYU-Poly first-year students on a tour of their new neighborhood, and across Tillary Street to just the other side of Flatbush Avenue, heading up to Ouchi Gallery,

a secret gem of a home-style art gallery that displays work of contemporary Japanese artists. As its website explains,

No, not "ouch". Pronounced OOH-WOO-CH-I, Ouchi is Japanese for "home" or "house". Our gallery has this name because it displays works by contemporary Japanese artists in a home-like setting.

Art should be more than a business commodity. It should transform all of our daily lives, awakening new thoughts and passions each day. The best art teaches that there are no limits to individual pursuits; that our own possibilities are infinite.
So when you visit Ouchi Gallery, we hope that you feel both at home and inspired. Perhaps you will feel something exhilarating—a positive "ouch!"

We were there for the opening reception for Harumi Yamada's "The Daydreamer's Sketch," a show featuring some of this innovative artist's exquisite works that manifest a kind of blunt ethereality.

This was the artist's first solo exhibition, and we were really impressed with the integrity of her tiny objects, both wryly playful and delicately wrought.

She's a Japanese speaker, of course, but we are pretty sure we got across that we liked her art a great deal.

Her statement for this show:

There are always arts in my life.
At a given moment, an image appears in my mind, I turn this image into
a drawing, writing or a sculpture.
Being a product of my subconscious, it is very difficult to explain what it is.
Therefore, I seek to make the image visible and tangible.

I believe, it is the best way to express myself more purely.
I would like to know where my images come from or what they mean.
For I come up with the answer to this question, I try to keep creating.

The little chihuahua in the Ouchi Gallery logo, we think, is just above, with the artist and another visitor.

You can see Harumi Yamada's work until Sunday, September 5, at Ouchi Gallery, which was, for us, a nice discovery - up five floors in suite 507 of 170 Tillary Street - in a familiar place, just off Flatbush Avenue right by the start of the Manhattan Bridge.