Month: August 2010

Yuki Kimura

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Since opening at the end of last year, the IZU PHOTO MUSEUM has held exhibitions that convey the diversity of photography: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s NATURE OF LIGHT exhibition conceiving of the birth of photography, and SUSPENDING TIME: Life—Photography—Death, in which everyday photographs overlooked by history were highlighted. We now present the contemporary artist Yuki Kimura’s first solo exhibition at a museum.

Based in Kyoto, Kimura uses photographs and film in the context of contemporary art as materials, as well as analysis and thought concerning time and image, and has exhibited two- and three-dimensional works that expand into the exhibition space. Beginning with the 6th Istanbul Biennial (1999), she has participated in foreign group exhibitions and major art fairs, steadily continuing to receive better reviews, centering on those from domestic and foreign critics and curators who follow the next generation of artists.

 The subject exhibition, with entirely new works, has been named “Untitled”. As in the title, by excluding stories and keywords, through the works alone Kimura attempts a more practical expression of her deliberation on the relationship between the image and its supporting medium or the photograph’s posteriority, which has matured slowly through her past work. In addition, there is no central image; while the effect created by the arranged individual images expands freely in various directions, the entire space forms a single installation work.

The photographs used here include those that Kimura took herself while traveling, those found in her grandfather’s albums, those purchased from various cities across the world, those sent from friends, etc. They reached the artist through various routes, and have been carefully selected according to their themes. Kimura attempts to bind the images of the “past” indicated by the photographs or the correlation between the image and the object with the space before one’s eyes through her analytical involvement with the simple task of arrangement. In this manner, a “present” only to be found here now, vividly appears in “Untitled.”

Yuki Kimura
Born in 1971 and based in Kyoto. Yuki Kimura is internationally active, utilizing photography, film and 3-dimensional installations. Recent major solo exhibitions include Year 1940 was a leap year starting on Monday at the Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo 2009), and POSTERIORITY at the Daiwa Press Viewing Room (Hiroshima 2009). In 2011, she intends to participate in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito and the National Museum of Art, Osaka


IZU PHOTO MUSEUM

Marcus Coates

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Marcus Coates is renowned for his shamanic performances, where a community or an individual is invited to ask difficult questions pertaining to their own predicament, from the deeply personal to the broadly political. Coates summons answers by communing with an animal kingdom that is part imagined, part scientifically observed. In costume and literally entranced, he relates the nature of this host of species and their attendant attributes; and from these narratives he extracts analogies, identifies thought patterns and discerns clues to a wider understanding.

For his first exhibition at the gallery, Coates has absented himself from the gallery, displaying only the material peripherals of these performances. We are presented with the questions asked and answers offered, as well as the costumes and objects used to facilitate the exchange, displayed like anthropological artefacts of a strangely familiar culture. The questions and answers are translated and transcribed during each performance, the handwriting indicating a sense of urgency behind each social, political or personal problem addressed. The objects have been collected, adapted and reused over years, bridging the utilitarian and the symbolic, the everyday and the mythical. Several pairs of glasses bound together become a mask and a mode of seeing beyond the immediate; lemon juice produces a soured, contorted face, which, in some shamanic traditions, increases the chance of admittance to the grotesque realm of the spirits.

Participants in these performances may or may not believe in Coates’s abilities as a transcendental shaman – the point is not so much the validity of his claims, but the discussion they elicit. With such pressing issues as anorexia and war on participants’ agendas, it can be the naïve outsider who asks the obvious, but useful, questions. And it is Coates’s recourse to the world of animals that demarcates an alternative space, enabling the demystification of social relations, imaginative speculation on causes and the dramatic resolution of enduring problems.

Kate MacGarry

Becky Beasley // P.A.N.O.R.A.M.A.

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There is an undeniably tragic irony in dropping dead while digging a whole
in the ground. This is more or less what overcame Eadweard Muybridge on
May 8, 1904. A closing note in every biography of the late photographer
speculates on the fact that at the time of his death he was busy digging out
a scale model of the American Great Lakes in his back garden at No. 2,
Liverpool Road, Kingston. Muybridge had retired and after an early career
as a book seller and later on as a successful photographer in the US, had
returned to England, serenely converting to gardening.

Beasley’s works have often dealt with finding bare existential conditions
buried in small, closed environments – the space of a room, a book, a box,
or of a dish, presenting them as banal theaters of the human condition and
the choices it leaves. The particular starting point for P.A.N.O.R.A.M.A. is the
fenced Victorian garden of E. Muybridge, as it was maintained and adapted
by its current owners. A panoramic series of 12 segmented photographs,
Beasley’s first digitally produced colour works, were taken in the actual garden
early winter of 2009 and were named after the individual panels of
Muybridge’s 1878 panorama of San Francisco, the orientation of each of the
views in the garden corresponding to one of the views of the San Francisco
panorama. The figure of the fenced garden, the swimming pool —  a bit further
on in the show the viewer will discover the figure of the lakes — function very
much like key holes, allowing an oneiric slippage of the physical world into a
uncanny, surreal state, tracing both Muybridge’s late moments and the
photographic condition as a passage from light to dark, from movement to rest.

The exhibition consists of new gelatin silver print photography, Beasley’s first
digitally produced color prints, sculpture and a monumental linoleum floor work.

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