Kunié Sugiura: Dark Matters/Light Affairs
Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis
April 8 – May 18, 2001
Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection
1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
Room 124, Art Building, University of California, Davis
www.nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu
Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis
April 8 – May 18, 2001
Kunié Sugiura: Dark Matters/Light Affairs features a selection of some thirty major works produced in the past twelve years by New York artist Kunié Sugiura (b. Nagoya, Japan, 1942). Kunié Sugiura, a subject of many one-artist shows and a featured participant in New Photography 13 (1997) is an artist of International renown.
Kunié Sugiura’s chosen medium is the photogram, a camera-less photograph made by placing objects (often, in Kunié Sugiura’s work, living beings) in front of photographic paper and exposing them to light. Sugiura’s images – the preserved shadows of flowers, land and sea creatures, and even boxers frozen in battle – resonate with a sense of immediacy and discovery like that which animates the work of the earliest photographers. At the same time, she is the contemporary avatar of a long Japanese visual tradition grounded in the haunting, economical beauty of the silhouette.
Skeins of swirling photographic chemicals, intentionally fixed at the printing stage, suspend Kunié Sugiura’s subjects in the otherworldly present_tense of the darkroom. Her lush positive and negative renderings prompt reconsideration of the photogram as a vehicle of illusionism, as an exquisite dialect of design, and as the self-portraiture of the natural world, acting out timeless private dramas.
KUNIE SUGIURA
Dark Matters/Light Affairs
Exhibition Catalog
Dark Matters/Light Affairs is a traveling exhibition organized by Pamela Auchincloss Arts Management Services, the exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalog, distributed by the University of Washington Press and featuring essays by Bill Arning of the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Joel Smith of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.
Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection
1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
Room 124, Art Building, University of California, Davis
www.nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu
