Yoko Ikeda & Mary Laube
The World is Our Idea
Laurence Miller Gallery, New York
January 7 – February 28, 2021
Moving through the world, we all infuse the things we encounter with personal meaning. Photographer YOKO OKEDA (b. 1965 Kanazawa City, Japan) and painter MARY LAUBE (b. 1985 Seoul, Korea) use their respective mediums to explore this routine form of creativity.
Speaking about her photographic practice, Yoko Ikeda explains that it’s not her intent to record her surroundings, instead she seeks to “create a new world through the lens”. She intentionally seeks out “humble” situations and objects, seeing in them an opportunity for imaginative transformation. Because these small moments go overlooked they are also more free, lacking larger meanings they can become vessels for Yoko Ikeda’s personal visions.
Mary Laube cites the creative aspect of memory as being central to her approach to painting. When things are remembered imperfectly our minds fill in the gaps, Mary Laube expresses this in her paintings by allowing objects to slide towards abstraction. As these things move away from their original forms and functions they become more personal, markers of half-remembered places and times. Similarly, her work deals with the mutable nature of identity when she “paraphrases” cultural objects from Korea, a country that she grew up with virtually no direct memory of, having transplanted to the US at a young age where she was raised by her adopted family.
Mary Laube observes that something her and Yoko Ikeda’s work have in common is that, while human form is absent from their pictures, a human presence is always strongly implied. Yoko Ikeda’s photographs allow things within the frame to go out of focus, lending a subjective and improvised feeling to her images. Rather than a neutral depiction, Yoko Ikeda offers a the sense of the kind of close and personalized looking that life’s quieter moments allow for. Mary Laube’s objects have a similar mood, they feel as if they’re partly remembered and partly created by the associated acts of thinking and looking.
Both of these artists create pictures that suggest that the world isn’t a place but an idea that’s unique to each of us, made anew when we take the time to look.
YOKO IKEDA was born in Kanazawa City, and studied at the Research Department of the Tokyo College of Photography. She now lives and works in Tokyo. Her work has been exhibited in many one-person and group shows throughout Japan, as well as in Belgium and various venues in the United States. In 2013, she was the recipient of the prestigious Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchase Award, and her work is included in their collection. In 2016 she was awarded the Higashikawa New Photographer Award and in 2018 Ikeda was awarded the first ALPA purchase award for Best Artist at Photo Basel.
MARY LAUBE was born in Seoul, Korea and grew up in the Chicago area. She received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Iowa. Recent exhibitions include VCU Qatar, Trestle Gallery (NYC), Monaco (St Louis), Troppus Projects (Kent), the Spring Break Art Show (NYC), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (NYC), California State University (Stanislaus), and Coop Gallery (Nashville). She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville in Painting and Drawing.
LAURENCE MILLER GALLERY
9 East 8th Street, New York, NY 10003
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