Linger (A While)

In a series of large-scale photographs, a youthful body is seen in a variety of cramped domestic settings. Whether a glimpse of a back in a bathtub behind a butterfly-patterned shower curtain or curled unclothed in sunshine on a bed hemmed in by racks of clothing, the images hover somewhere between staged and candid, between innocent and knowingly alluring. There is a nascent sexuality, both amplified and restrained by its homely setting, by thresholds of isolation and privacy, or lack of.

Around the body, details of the crowded home press in, surrounding, informing, allowing us further tantalising glimpses of an environment that both shapes and constrains. This is the artist’s own body on show - angular, vulnerable, desirous, desirable. In Linger (A While), Nakamura delicately explores the interior tumult of the young adult and the intensity of inarticulate feeling. In the invitation to look, we are both joined in intimacy and the potential breaching of a private boundary. Perhaps both are proposed. Our gaze is not returned.

Text by Hidden Space, https://hiddenspace.land