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2012.02.02

CONTEMPLATION: Emerging Female Photographers from Japan

contemplation
CONTEMPLATION: Emerging Female Photographers from Japan
Photographs by Tomoe Murakami, Ai Takahashi, Yuki Tawada, and Yuhki Touyama
Guest Curated by Mariko Takeuchi & James Nakagawa

Feb 3 – Mar 31, 2012
Artists’ Talk & Reception: Thursday, March 8, 7pm

pictura gallery
122 W Sixth St
Bloomington, IN 47404
phone: 812.336.0000
gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday 11-7 and by appointment
http://www.picturagallery.com/



Photographs depict no more than what is visible. Yet at the same time they possess the uncanny ability to reveal the invisible. Just as the hands of the clock mark the linear passing of time, photography can mark our memory, consciousness, desires, and emotions. Beyond merely documenting the visible world, one of the photographers’ roles is to create a space for reflecting and gazing upon such invisibilities. This exhibition introduces the work of four emerging Japanese female photographers who engage these invisibilities from various angles.

Tomoe Murakami stares at the boundary between the visible and the invisible through her ephemeral landscapes which are often filled with mist or clouds. By erasing and scratching the surface of her prints, Yuki Tawada uncovers a strength and inter-dependence which transcends the people and cities captured in her images. It can be said that Murakami traces the limit of photography from the inside while Tawada does so from the outside. In snap-shot photographs by Yuhki Toyama, everyone and everything look isolated while longing for the other. This is how she reveals the deeper darkness which swallows an individual even as he/she is not willing to admit it. Ai Takahashi’s continuous shooting of remote rural villages and their inhabitants illuminates the accumulated experience of place that runs perpendicular to our urban linear experience of time.

The title of this exhibition CONTEMPLATION comes from the Latin contemplatio meaning the “act of looking at” something. In turn this stems from contemplo meaning “to gaze attentively, observe.” More important is that its original meaning was “to mark out a space for observation (as an augur does).” These photographers, too, delineate from, within the real world a space for observation and contemplation of the invisible. Viewing ourselves in this consecrated space we cannot help but reconsider our individual and collective pasts and futures.

Mariko Takeuchi, Curator
James Nakagawa, Co-Curator