Ruin – Reconstruction
Timequakes was born from my experience of the earthquake that occurred in Japan in March 2011. As an outlet for what I experienced at that time, I transposed the chaos of material destruction with temporal collisions. These are votive pictures created through the mingling of 15th to 16th century painted portraits with contemporary photo portraits against a luminous background.
Compression and Layering
I have a number of photographs that I originally shot, compiled and stored as a source for future works – portraits of models with eternal, unchanging beauty, copies of paintings collected in my own imaginary art museum, and night images of Tokyo in quavering light that will become a metaphor for the earthquake. For this series I have tapped into these and reworked them into new compositions. Using this method, they appear as a compressed layering that exposes the temporal collisions and sedimentations.
Concrete – Abstract
When photographs first appeared, paintings tended to become more abstract. Reflecting this trend in Timequakes, I mixed character expression in a background made to look like a contemporary context. The hybrid character images in the portrait genre form a bridge between painting and photography. At the same time, they form a link between ancient and contemporary art, and figuration and abstraction.
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