| Ice ParkJanuary 12, 2008- February 23, 2008Reception: January 12, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Extended through February 23rd.
Furunishi’s recent works portray the drama of the great American landscape. In this new series, Furunishi turns away from the vibrant colors of Southern California and presents a world almost entirely in black and white. Ice Park, shot in the snowy peaks of Colorado, is a group of seven images that make up one single panoramic tableau, but are each discrete photographs.
Furunishi’s pictures seem to unravel Western conventions of landscape depictions. Rather than horizontal, they have a vertical orientation and lack a horizon line, sharing something with traditional Japanese and Chinese landscape painting. Digital tapestries stitched together from views taken at varying distance and perspective, their field of vision is compressed and the images are uniformly high-definition. Rather than provide a fixed point of view, they invite the viewer’s eye to wander restlessly across the photograph, allowing the image to recede freely and advance.
In their topsy-turvy dismissal of a single, coherent perspective, Furunishi’s photographs radically destabilize our experience of the world, challenging our natural assumption that the earth beneath our feet is enduring and immutable.
Noriko Furunishi was born in 1966 in Kobe, Japan. She received a BFA from the Pratt Institute, NY and an MFA from UCLA. Her work has been exhibited in Ecotopia, the Second ICP Triennale of Photography and Video at the International Center for Photography, New York, Landscape: New Acquisitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Super Vision, ICA Boston, Picturing Modernity: The Photography Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whose Nature? What’s Nature?, Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Distinct Impressions: Photographs from the Permanent Collection, Palm Springs Art Museum, Global Anxieties: Nine Perspectives on a Changing Planet, The College of Wooster Art Museum. Noriko Furunishi lives and works in Los Angeles.
Reviews of Ice ParkNew York Times
February 1, 2008 | | Roberta Smith | | "This becomes more clear when you spot the nearly infinitesimal silhouettes of athletes climbing the sheer, crystalline waterfalls of ice. It may take a little longer before you realize that the scenes are often doubled, with bluffs and fringes of trees at the top and the bottom of the image. The most interesting thing about them is their resemblance to Chinese landscape painting...." |
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