FOIL GALLERY is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Misato Ban, “Filter Feeder” from July 7 to 29, 2012. Ban was born in Ishikawa in 1977. After graduating from Kanazawa College of Art, she studied in Antwerp and London. She is now based in Japan, going back and forth between her studios in Tokyo and Hakusan-city, Ishikawa. As she grew up in an area blessed with rich nature, where Mt. Hakusan has been an object of worship, Ban always feels a close connection to nature and its blessing, and it has led her to work on verifying her sense of distance, or feeling that she doesn’t quite relate which she is conscious of in her daily life, through the act of painting by contrasting what she obtains from nature and herself accustomed to the contemporary world. The title “Filter Feeder” means creatures that feed by straining suspended matter and food particles from water such as clams. Filter feeders absorb just organisms such as plankton out of seawater by filtering, and the process cleans the water eventually. It seems that Ban herself relates to the world as if she is one kind of filter feeders, restoring her sense by discharging it to the world as art works through the act of painting. In this show, you will see her brand-new works painted on canvases shaped by the artist herself, based on the objects she chose such as traditional patterns from a Kimono-sample book that her grandmother once brought with when getting married according to custom, fallen leaves, flowers, and tree stumps.