KANAKO SASAKI | KANAKO SASAKI: ILLUMINATIONS (HOW NOT TO FORGET)
April 11 – May 24, 2013
Dina Mitrani Gallery is pleased to present Kanako Sasaki: Illuminations (how not to forget) with an artist talk on Thursday April 11th at 7pm. The exhibition, the artist’s second solo show at the gallery, will be on view through May 24th and consists of photographic images as well as a video. During the time that the artist was beginning this recent series, the eastern coast of Japan was devastated by a massive earthquake and tsunami. These images are a response to the emotional loss that was caused by this natural disaster.
Sasaki’s previous series have primarily explored elements of history and narrative, usually depicting a figure re-enacting a scene or memory from the past. They evoke dream-like atmospheres, bordering between reality and fiction. In her current work, Illuminations, she continues illustrating surreal situations, yet the majority of the images are still lives, void of human figures. They contain symbolic or ritualistic objects, at times floating in a magical suspension above table depicted in most of the images. On a personal level, Sasaki was greatly affected by the 3-11 earthquake; the images in this series are her effort to preserve those memories of the places and things that were physically washed away by the disaster.
With her video piece, Sasaki explores nature and the cosmos and takes her findings to a metaphysical level. She studied numerical data calculated by the simulation astronomer, Eiichiro Kokubo at the National Observatory in Japan and combined them with texts from “The Diary of Anne Frank” to create her video installation. The data shows the formation of terrestrial planets from 4.6 million years ago, and each formation is synched with emotion.
Kanako Sasaki was educated at the Royal College of Art in London and received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has had solo exhibitions in the US, Japan, Bolivia and Hungary and has been included in many international group exhibitions. She has participated in artist residencies in Iceland, Paris, Estonia, Vienna and New York and been awarded many fellowships and grants. She has also taught photography at CUNY Staten Island, NY and the International Summer School of Photography in Latvia. She will soon be attending a residency in Ganz, Austria.
