As an artmaker, Masumi Shibata is not only under the radar, he's zipping right by the radar gun — he's invisible. His work is not in galleries. He is an artist in disguise,
working a regular job as a graphic designer for the Skolkin + Chickey design studio and for SITE Santa Fe.

Shibata is moving quickly, working with concepts that morph as he goes and building unusual objects that bring those concepts into the real world. Sometimes he looks back and thinks some things he did may be dumb, like the title of his favorite piece, Hour Glass Sand Timer, which he called "just a stupid, normal name."

The piece, constructed in 2007, features an hourglass seemingly separated at the middle by a large disc of back-to-back mirrors. "If you look at the top, the sand is going into each other, and underneath the sand is coming out of nothing," Shibata said in a recent interview at the Mission Café. "So it kind of represents how we perceive time: it goes to nowhere and it comes out of nowhere. It's really fun to watch the last seconds of the sand."

Shibata can't remember where he came up with the idea for Hour Glass, which is an item in the catalog for the "fake educational company" he has created.

"I like to make tools," he said. "I'm more interested in objects like this [a salt shaker on the table] than I am in that picture on the wall [a framed photograph of Mother Teresa]. The reason I started this fake educational company was to blur the lines between art and design and products."

Shibata has worked at Skolkin + Chickey since June. He enjoys the freedom of working at a job and making art on the side; he doesn't have to depend on selling art to buy bread and coffee. He hastened to add that all of his artworks (viewable on his Web site, masumieducational.com) are available for purchase.

A good portion of those works incorporate text — and sometimes delve into the structure of letters and words. This predilection relates to calligraphy studies during his childhood in Japan. Shibata grew up in Takayama, a mountainous area of central Japan where photographers have famously captured snow-dappled monkeys resting in hot springs.

In 2000, at age 18, he moved to the United States. He majored in photography at Utah State University, and then earned his master of fine arts degree at The University of New Mexico and began doing paper-based three-dimensional mixed-media pieces.

His materials palette soon expanded. One of his fake educational tools is Keeping Time, an altered wall clock. The only hand left is the second hand, and instead of the
12 numbers, the words inhale and exhale alternate around the clock's face.

"Something I'm constantly interested in is the concept of time, but it's trying to figure out our relationship to this linear time we came up with, like 0-1-2-3-4, rather than other kinds of time that we perceive," Shibata said. "Like rocks as a time medium in geology, all the layers, and also like breathing is time. So I came up with Keeping Time."

New Pencil also deals with the concept of time. "We try to keep track of everything by writing it down, but I like the idea of erasing, subtracting. Every time I use a pencil, my eraser goes out before I use all the pencil. So in this one the parts are reversed."

The piece has a teeny little stub of a pencil and a hilariously long eraser. "It's kind of questioning our obsession to keep records and make memos and remember everything," he said.

In his Uncertain English Dictionary (UED), Shibata typographically combines opposite words like love and hate, chaos and order. "Even when I use paper, I never think of it as two-dimensional," he said of the dictionary, which was published last spring by Preacher's Biscuit Books of Rochester, New York. "I really like the idea of paper as different fibers put together to be strong."

In line with his preoccupation with time, Shibata has focused on nonlinear forms. One example is his Karaoke piece, also published by Preacher's Biscuit. It consists of a collection of photograms made by placing pieces of photosensitive paper in a tray of water on an audio speaker and exposing them to light. Each resulting image is a "picture" of the sound at a moment of a musical recording.

"That's all in the past," he said. "I didn't know at the time what I was interested in; then I started to realize I was interested in nonlinear forms. So if you go to masumieducational.com, you can see I always try to visualize invisible things. For example, you have memory so another project is called Nonlinear Journal. This is for people to write in, but each page is a circular piece, and it's a three-dimensional puzzle, like an architectural journal that you construct with pieces from the different days and forms."

Hole in the Sky is another fun tool, a tiny booklet that unfolds very easily (due to a sophisticated origami technique called Miura-fold) into a picture of the sky and clouds with a hole in it. When you hold it up outside, you can see the real sky and clouds through the hole.

Another of Shibata's favorite pieces is graphixil 300. It looks like a deluxe pillbox holding two small pills, and the pills are made of graphite. "Adults and children 3 years and over: draw what you like to relieve your pain," the enclosed directions say.

graphixil 300, like all Shibata's works, looks perfect, as if it were made in a factory. The fact is that the artist has become skilled at engineering and manufacturing to make the things he conceives. For graphixil 300, he found a little stainless-steel case; inserted a piece of tape with the printed directions inside its top; cut a piece of foam core for the pill-holder material; and then carved the pills from a chunk of graphite.

"I come up with the vision, and then it's, 'What do I have to do to make it?'" he said.

For another example, Exist Sign, he created a facsimile of an "EXIT" sign; his says "EXIST." He made the shallow wooden box, which incorporates a light, and then had a friend in an Albuquerque architect's office use a laser to cut the letters in the face panel. Exist Sign is a good example of the "clean, contemporary, designy look" that Shibata favors, for one reason because it prevents viewers from interpreting his artworks as "Japanese" or "Eastern."

He also likes the look because it facilitates "multiple punch lines," as he put it. A viewer might see the sign and just think of it as a joke, but it can also make the viewer think about the function of an exit sign, Shibata explained. Rather than bearing a message that appears to order you to exit, it now appears to order you to exist.

"I realize if you keep things simple and bold, it just, by itself, generates multiple degrees of understanding," Shibata said. "Even to me, by making it, I would be thinking like that. That's why I enjoy it. It surprises me."

The artist created an edition of 10 handmade books for a project called Heart Stops Beating. It's a children's book about the biological process of a body decomposing and going back into the earth. The subject of this book, which features Shibata's drawings, links back to a job he had when he was in grad school at UNM: photographing autopsies for the Office of the Medical Investigator.

"I don't think a lot of things I've thought about from that job have come up in my art yet," he said. "The way I approach art I got from that job, in that the fragility of life is scary, but it's also enjoyable and interesting. You can't tell what's going to happen 10 seconds in front of you. ... It makes life more engaging.

"In my work, I'm trying to play with the fine line between serious, scary fear and being funny or cynical. I like to be able to laugh at myself, at something that concerns me. So these are my concerns, but at the same time I'm trying to laugh at them."

Heart Stops Beating is a beautifully made little book, the cover colored like human skin and as soft as human skin. This aspect — the feel of his artpieces — is quite important to Shibata.

"Oh, totally," he responded. "The perfection ... I don't like it to be perfect, because that's impossible, but craftsmanship is a very huge part of my work. Making is part of thinking, so if you're so focused, it's got to be good."