Mesa College’s newest art exhibition is now on display. “Fobia” features the contributed work of Shinpei Takdea, a Japanese artist. Takeda has an extensive history in art and international knowledge of visual arts he came out with process where he wanted to take the phobias of the people and turn them into art.

On march 16 through the 24 Shinpei build the “Fobia Office” where he had one on one sessions with twenty-nine people who share their fears with him as he listen, than he made them write the word of their phobia in a paper with chinese ink.

Takeda started the process by projecting the word into the whole gallery and took a picture, after he made copies of the photographs and carb them into wood pieces calling this process “Liberty” by liberating the phobia.

Takeda had volunteers and one them was Farnaz Forouzan an art major student at Mesa, who she also was one of the participants that had a one on one session. Forouzan shared “When I was with him we talked about the politicians and the fears of the public… he is a nice guy that he can speak and listen to everything you say.”

On April 6 he gave a conference where he explain the process of “Fobia” to the people who came and see the work, where all across the gallery the words hang in the walls of the gallery and the wood pieces were in the center of the room forming a vessel with wings.

Leticia Gomez the gallery coordinator who help directly Takeda with the process of the “Fobia” exhibition mention “the photographs of the words on the walls represent each conversation he had with someone describing them as  ‘testimonios’ (testimonies) that represent individual conversations, individual memories, individual traumas, individual people had gone thru.”

Also she explain that what he wanted to do with the vessel was to put all phobias together, something that unifies a community of fears.