Noriko Furunishi is known for her unique landscape photography. In 2004, she started making a series of trips to different places including Southern California. For Furunishi, who grew up in the densely planned new residential area in Japan, Southern California's huge spaces and emptiness made her puzzled and attracted at the same time, which resulted in a series of works. For this series, Furunishi used 4 x 5 camera and scanned ｓｅｌｅｃｔed negatives onto a computer to create works. With Untitled (Dirt Track)（2005）, for example, she used 4 to 6 images to compose one image. At first sight, the curvilinear "dirt track" in this work looks natural. However, close looks to the details (highways and cars) reveal the odd scale and orientation. In Furunishi's works, times and places seem to become intertwined, resulting in a kind of mysterious ubiquitousness. When we think about landscape photography, images that document beauty and magnificence of particular times and places come to our mind instantly. Furunishi succeeds this long history of landscape conventions critically and creatively with new techniques. By doing so, she also seeks new possibilities in photography with even longer history. Concept:
Tomio Koyama Gallery Kyoto is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Noriko Furunishi in Japan, featuring 11 new works created with techniques of multiple exposure and mixing both positive and negative in one image, which are different techniques from the ones she employed in the last series described above. Artist Biography:
Noriko Furunishi was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1966. She graduated from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, in 1993, and received MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 2005. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Furunishi has held her major solo exhibitions at Murray Guy (New York, 2005 and 2008) and Minneapolis Institute of the Arts (Minneapolis, USA, 2009), and her major group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2006), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, 2007), and International Center of Photography (New York, 2006). Her works have been included in the public collections of Museum of Modern Art (New York), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), and Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston). This is the first solo exhibition at Tomio Koyama Gallery. * The text provided by Tomio Koyama Gallery.