User:Nandia.sc/Emi Honda

Emi Honda is a Japanese visual artist, musician, and composer who is currently living and working on the unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) Nations, or also known as Montréal, Canada. Her interest in gardening, as well as her fascination towards the lush landscape and various local flora, has fused with her sculptural installation, video art practice, and her music career.

Honda has performed in public spaces, festivals, and on stage such as; Powell Street Festival, Hornby Island Fall Fair, and Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MACM). She has collaborated with many artists, including; Jordan McKenzie for their musical group called Elfin Saddle, and Scott Evans at UNIT/PITT Society for Art & Critical Awareness.

Life
Emi Honda is originally from southern Japan where she grew up in a family-run Buddhist temple. Honda moved to Vancouver Island in the late 90s where she immediately become fascinated with its lush landscape and local flora. She began cultivating her hobbies in gardening and building complex mechanical sculptures that becomes the foundation of her artistic and musical practice. Honda met Jordan McKenzie during her time in art school, where the two quickly became friends and collaborators. In 2006, they moved to Montreal in search of more opportunities and formed their art and musical group called Elfin Saddle. Unfortunately a very sad news came from the musical duo in 2016, where McKenzie was found dead near the shoreline of Hornby Island, B.C. And for Honda, she still continues her artistic and her musical career until today.

Honda has always shown a profound engagement with issues of environmental sustainability and the emotional impact of economic/political ideologies that continually foreclose on the possibility of genuine, progressive renewal and redirection. Her works are usually comprised of scavenged objects, organic materials and plastic detritus, that creates surreal green landscapes with auto-kinetic loops of micro-mechanical routines and sound-generating processes.

Work
Emi Honda’s first exhibition was The Great Scattered Remnants at Helen Pitt Gallery in Vancouver, BC in 2005.

In 2007, Honda had an exhibition in at Centre des arts actuels SKOL in Montreal, QC, called Wasted – Growing – Space, where she creates immersive installation environments comprised of found objects, live beings (plants Honda herself has grown from seeds) and still other object/beings that are caught somewhere in the middle of transforming into something else.

In 2014, Honda had another exhibition called Music Temple at Centre A - Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Vancouver, BC, where it becomes one of the most important show for her.

Honda has one solo show and 6 group shows over the last 9 years.