Tokyo, Japan – waitingroom is pleased to announce Yuko MOHRI Solo Exhibition “Pleated Image” which is the artist’s solo exhibition for the first time in three years at our gallery. It will showcase her brand new installation which consists of scanners and scanned images, formerly exhibited in the exhibition “THE BEGINNINGS (or Open-Ended)” [2nd period] through February 26th to March 27th at Minatomachi POTLUCK BUILDING (Nagoya), and more brushed up version will be presented in the exhibition at our gallery. It is MOHRI’s first installation work to express the relationship between three-dimensional and two-dimensional searching through the relationship between object and image.
Born in 1980 in Kanagawa, lives and works in Tokyo. Yuko MOHRI produces installations that convey intangible energies such as magnetism, gravity, light, and temperature, by creating assemblages of reconfigured everyday items and machine parts collected in cities around the world. She stayed in New York for 6 months from spring 2015 as a grantee of Asian Cultural Council (ACC) and won the grand prix of “NISSAN ART AWARD 2015” in the same year. Her recent major exhibitions include “The Way Things Go” (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2016), “Mirror Mirror” (Kate Werble Gallery, New York, 2015), “Yokohama Triennale 2014” (Yokohama Museum, Yokohama, 2014), “Sapporo International Art Festival 2014” (Seikatei / Chi Ka Ho, Sapporo, 2014), “Unseen Existence” (Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, 2014), “OROCHI” (waitingroom, Tokyo, 2013), “Circus” (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Bloomberg Pavilion, Tokyo, 2012) and many others both in Japan and abroad. She will stay as an artist-in-residence at Victoria and Albert Museum (London) and then at Camden Arts Centre (London) from summer to fall total for 4 months. During the same time of our exhibition, MOHRI is also participating in the group exhibition “Roppongi Crossing 2016 : My Body, Your Voice” at Mori Art Museum (3/26-7/10).
Left: Ofuna Flower Center, 2015 , installation view (Minatomachi POTLUCK BUILDING, Photo : Ryohei Tomita)
Right: I/O – Chamber of a Musical Composer-, Yokohama Triennale 2014 , installation view (Photo courtesy of Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale, Photo : Yuichiro Tanaka)
Ribbons, feather dusters, butterfly toys, coins, LED lights…these familiar objects from MOHRI’s past works are set on several scanners and they move based on their individual mechanics. The movement of these objects is scanned on each of the scanners continuously and the image data is saved onto the hard disk one after another. As long as the scanner is working, the image grows semi-permanently, and it includes the concept of movement and time in a different aspect from videos (movies) that is based on a linear timeline. The artist named this installation device that creates various takes on movement and time as an image of numerous pleats folding on top of the other = “Pleated Image.” (The ‘image’ is singular because the artist has in mind the various aspects of a single image and not the multiple images of it.)
The massive volumes of image data endlessly generated by the installation device clearly have an art historical reference, such as “chronophotography” by Etienne-Jules Marey, and “photogram (rayogram)” by Moholy-Nagy László and Man Ray. MOHRI’s signature works have been mechanical installations until today. Her very first visual image piece seems to introduce to the world the inheritance of the visual experiment.
Also, MOHRI compares these image data that includes such elements as Are, Bure, Boke (rough, blurred and out-of-focus) and digital errors to “ghost photography,” in the way it brings into view “something that should not be there.” Ghost photography became a popular topic from the late 19th century and into the 20th century. They come into effect when the viewers project their emotions onto the ambiguous image that is shown in the picture, and the same can be said about MOHRI’s work. The artist’s statement could be that live art comes into effect for the first time when the imaginations of the audience access the manmade mechanical devices. She says, “My interest is in the artistic approach on the process of generating ambiguous states of blurred and swaying objects and events, and accessing the human imagination with it.”
MOHRI has been introducing various works based on her interest in the “blur” and “sway” created by natural phenomenon, such as the malfunctioning of a device, light, wind, and magnetic force. The audience standing within her installation that visualizes the invisible force must have “sensed” a presence as if someone was there. There may be an invisible product of coincidence in the enormous amount of “pleated image data” presented in her work for this exhibition, Pleated Image. The “sense” that was apparent in MOHRI’s past works are demonstrated to us as “visual images” for this show.
Following her new work, Moré Moré (Leaky): The Falling Water Given #1-3 which won the grand prize at the “Nissan Art Award 2015,” MOHRI continues her ambitious challenges. We hope for you to come and enjoy her latest works.
*The images automatically scanned by the installation are uploaded on Flickr continuously in a real time during the exhibition period.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/139876404@N07
Left: Urban Mining, 2015 , installation view (SPIRAL, Courtesy of SPIRAL/Wacoal Art Center Photo: Nobutada Omote)
Right: Moré Moré (Leaky): The Falling Water Given #1-3, 2015 , installation view (NISSAN ART AWARD2015, photo: Keizo Kioku)
