Artist Talk - Chieko Murasugi + Heather Gordon

Join an artist talk with Chieko Murasugi and Heather Gordon!

Chance Encounters brings together the work of Chieko Murasugi and Heather Gordon. At first glance, their compositions appear as vibrant, dynamic abstractions, yet each piece is shaped by chance within carefully constructed visual systems. Working with structured frameworks and precise materials—acrylic on panel for Murasugi and oil on canvas for Gordon—both artists balance intuition and method, allowing rhythm, variation, and complexity to emerge over time.

Chieko Murasugi is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is shaped by personal history and perception. Born in Tokyo, raised in Toronto, and now based in Chapel Hill, she traces her fascination with chance to her parents, both survivors of the 1945 Tokyo bombings—her mother’s quick decision to run toward the river saved her life. Murasugi’s newest series, Deuce, uses computer-based randomization to guide composition and color. Each piece features two large circles that share ground but never touch, creating a tension that evokes distance, division, and the challenge of connection. “I was thinking about the United States,” Murasugi explains, “a country broadly divided into left and right, two sides with very different beliefs that struggle to communicate with one another.”

Heather Gordon constructs her paintings and drawings through constraint-based systems that combine mirrored grids, mathematical relationships, and predetermined rules. She establishes compositional fields and then introduces controlled chance operations to shape the distribution and application of color. Working in oil on canvas and ink on paper, Gordon creates layered visual fields where structure and chance interact, allowing balance and complexity to develop over time.

Together, Murasugi and Gordon explore the tension between chance and method, intuition and system, presenting abstraction as both a visual and intellectual experience.