Bio
Works
Contact

About

The Philadelphia-based artists Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib have been collaborators since 2008. They are recipients of several honored awards including a 2015 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Pew Fellowships in the Arts and Fellowships from CFEVA and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Their work has been widely exhibited both domestically and abroad at venues including, Fondazione MAXXI (Rome), New Media Gallery (Vancouver), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), UCLA Hammer Museum, PS1/MoMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Arizona State University Art Museum. They have been artists-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Banff Centre, Marble House Project and the Millay Colony for Arts. Matthew Suib is co-founder of Greenhouse Media and Nadia Hironaka serves as a professor of film and video and studio arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Hironaka & Suib are represented by Locks Gallery. The couple, along with their daughter and two cats reside in South Philly.

From 2007-2010, as an extension of their artistic practice, Hironaka and Suib founded Screening. Philadelphia’s first gallery dedicated to the presentation of innovative and challenging works on video and film, Screening was a project devoted to expanding access to these media and exploring the influence of moving image culture on our understanding and experience of the world. Screening’s program has included solo exhibitions of work by internationally renowned artists including Joan Jonas, Johan Grimonprez, Takeshi Murata, Mark Lewis, Kelly Richardson, Pat O’Neill, Valérie Mréjen and others.

>> PORTFOLIO
>> HOME

Field Companion

4k video with sound, 2021
Running time: 20:40

Set in a microcosmic forest, the film is based loosely on the pine barrens that dot Southern New Jersey near the home of Hironaka & Suib. Like many, the duo found refuge and solace

In Field Companion, the forest has been condensed and transplanted to a terrarium in the artists’ studio. Twelve cubic feet of pines, shrubs, ferns, moss, fungus and carnivorous plants are reflected infinitely in the terrarium’s mirrored walls and captured with a motion-controlled camera and specialized macro lens that dramatically shift the scale and perspective of this miniature landscape.

Living dwellers—snails, slugs, and insects inhabit the miniature ecosystem, accompanied by digitally rendered part-animal, part-human creatures. Through their conversations and interactions, they look forward, investigating progressive methods of sustainability. The film also touches upon the notion of forest-bathing, the Japanese practice of exploring the natural environment through our senses.

Field Companion was co-commissioned by Rowan University Art Gallery, Locust Projects and the New Jersey Council on the Arts.