ith wit and whimsey, the George Billis Gallery is transformed into the artist’s bedroom. She has pulped and molded discarded paper into pillows. Filling the exhibit space with her “pillows” the artist invites the audience to lie down, relax and contemplate the installation. The installation is covered by a deceptively protective weaving of tabloid newspapers. Almost sheltering - protective of the elements, one thinks of a tent like structure. The displacement of her bedroom is both inviting and jarring. The scene is uncomfortable, yet thought provoking. The idea of displacement is also incorporated in her two shows, concurrently showing in New York and Los Angeles. “I liked the idea of not walking through a door to go from my living room to my bedroom, but instead having to fly from one room to another,” says the artist. The discomforting elements in her work are disguised by the use of colorful collage and physical creations which incorporate the collage elements. Recycling plays a major role for the artist, as well as the idea of making the viewer aware of our society’s wasteful nature.

Niizeki has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, and her work is in numerous prestigious private collections. The artist has received full features in Sculpture Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, D’Art Magazine, The New York Times, New York Newsday and other newspapers and publications. She is also in the permanent collections at the Children’s Museum of the Arts (SoHo) and the Palo Alto Junior Museum, CA. This is her third solo exhibition at the George Billis Gallery.

he Picnic installation creates a new interpretation of a friendly and familiar event: the picnic. Using a picnic table collaged with junk mail and colorful newspaper flyers Niizeki, with sly wit, challenges us to look beyond the atmosphere of festive consumption that is represented in a picnic, while drawing attention to consequences of our everyday habits.
The artist has taken us out of the familiar park or backyard and created an environment inside the gallery to stimulate awareness of the results of our actions. The picnic table offers a site to encourage the Gallery visitors to actually sit and meditate on the not-so-simple act of eating lunch.

Draped with assembled sections of used window envelopes in the shape of a tarp, the collage provides shelter for the picnic table and the spectators. The tarp's transparency is both protective and visual, suggesting the role of large corporate conglomerates in our personal and public environments. The picnic table is set on Astroturf, recalling the well-trimmed lawn, emblem of American suburban bliss and the submission of nature into convenience for consumer use. A momentary escape into this happy scene is not possible, for it reveals, at once, the pleasures and the costs of consumption and their aftermath.

nstallation artist Niizeki Hiromi filled the gallery with over 500 unique handmade paper mache balls imbedded with 4-inch nails in her last exhibition. Constructed from pulped junkmail, the balls' aggressive shape causes discomfort; which is compounded by the pointed end of the nails sticking out from many of the balls. A large sheet covered with bits of printed information from the artist's own junkmail is draped from ceiling to floor, a contradiction to its traditional horizontal use as a bed covering. Paper mache on one side, all printed matter on the other, the blanket shows the evolution of the material from junk to pulp to art. Hiromi turned to pulped junk mail as a material for her art after discovering amount of paper still left after recycling. While this does recycle, that is not the only message she solely wants to communicate through her work. "I want to give life to materials that we don't even notice on a day-to-day basis," she says. "I view my installations as my voice, commenting on the way our society may show different emotions and indifference to abandoning objects; casting items away and transferring them into "junk". My installations deal with these castaway everyday objects, such as supermarket flyers, tabloid newspapers, junk mail, wire hangers, cardboard and more. I transform the junk objects into art installations that may make the viewer feel happy, active, alive or give them the opportunity to fanaticize about living and interacting in this strange environment created through the installation. The idea of using found urban objects, literally from trash cans at times, allows me to transcend the ideas of junk and transform it into new shapes and objects existing in unexpected contexts. Or reusing useful castaways such as twine, towel hooks, chicken wire, old pulleys and hangers."

"Objects that our society discards are given no identity other than trash. As art these materials are given a created identity. One of my recent installations involved the pulping of my own junk mail. The balls that where created where used in an interactive installation. Over 500 of these junk mail balls where on the floor of the gallery and the audience had to kick the balls upon entering the space in order to view the other works in the exhibition. The element of mystery existed since objects where hidden behind a six foot square junk mail 'sheet'. This 'sheet' was suspended from the gallery ceiling and to view the opposite side of the 'sheet' and objects behind it, the viewer had to fully enter the gallery. Another interactive installation was at the Clocktower. Supermarket flyers transformed the space into a three story installation which again the viewer could interact with. Transformation of junk to art allows me to accept junk and literally recreate it to a level that an audience can accept and translate it as something else, ie: object, art, unusual, recycled etc. Colorful tabloid newspapers and supermarket flyers interest me as they create a reality by using photo reproductions of 'what's on sale this week.' By collaging and pulping these images, a false or translated reality is created, translating the images into perhaps an unreadable yet recognizable collage, or perhaps displacing the flyer's original intent by collaging it on a twelve foot ladder."