Odyssey : Reflect, Archive photographs, Transferred Manually on to printed textiles, Unique piece, 27 x 35 cm, 35 x 120 cm, 81x 92 cm, 81 x 160 cm, 81 x 190 cm, 2013-2015
Odyssey : reflect
Odyssey : reflect, my most recent work, is born from a suitcase filled with photographs which a Japanese-American family had left in Lahaina, Maui, Hawai’i, where I grew up.
I did not know the man who found the suitcase, a Frenchman called Thomas Hardy. One day, by pure chance, he visited my studio, saw a photograph of Lahaina on the wall and mentioned the suitcase. He showed me the pictures, only once. Then we met—once again by chance—in a travel agency two years later. He was leaving France for good and decided to give the suitcase to me. For years I kept the photographs almost untouched, looking at them and using parts of them in some of my works. However, I didn’t really know what to do with them.
Suddenly in 2013, when I was invited for an exhibition by the Maui Arts and Cultural Center and the Honolulu Museum of Art, I realized what was happening: the photographs needed to go home, to their place of birth, and they would use me. Their very odyssey was a go-between, from the old generations to the youth of today: Don’t forget your ancestors. Don’t forget the place you come from.
I want to set a new light on supposedly ordinary photographs. Each home has these kinds of portraits, sleeping in a dark corner of the house. I want to re-evaluate their cultural and patrimonial importance.
Therefore, based on a corpus of photographs dating from the end of the 19th century to the 1950s, Odyssey follows a precise protocol. Having scanned and enlarged the pictures, I transfer them manually onto printed fabrics--
these embody for me the plurality of the cultural, traditional and symbolic patterns. Also their interconnections, their processes and the transformations the journey creates.
Hawai’i has been linked with Europe and Asia since it was discovered by Westerners. Japanese immigrants’ re-interpreted European cloths (Gingham, Vichy - called Palka in Hawai’I) were used as working clothes. Later they used kimono fabric for the Aloha shirts and sold them in Hawai’i.
For me the shapes, patterns, images and words used for these fabric are not merely ornamental. I was born and raised in cultures haunted by signs and shapes. The superimposition in my works of photographs and fabrics
(pattern, drawing, sign) attempts to modify the spectator’s viewpoint on the subject matters and materials I use.
The exhibition was shown at the Honolulu museum of art .
http://honolulumuseum.org/art/exhibitions/13988-first_h/
Month of photography at paris
http://www.mep-fr.org/evenement/miki-nitadori/
I did not know the man who found the suitcase, a Frenchman called Thomas Hardy. One day, by pure chance, he visited my studio, saw a photograph of Lahaina on the wall and mentioned the suitcase. He showed me the pictures, only once. Then we met—once again by chance—in a travel agency two years later. He was leaving France for good and decided to give the suitcase to me. For years I kept the photographs almost untouched, looking at them and using parts of them in some of my works. However, I didn’t really know what to do with them.
Suddenly in 2013, when I was invited for an exhibition by the Maui Arts and Cultural Center and the Honolulu Museum of Art, I realized what was happening: the photographs needed to go home, to their place of birth, and they would use me. Their very odyssey was a go-between, from the old generations to the youth of today: Don’t forget your ancestors. Don’t forget the place you come from.
I want to set a new light on supposedly ordinary photographs. Each home has these kinds of portraits, sleeping in a dark corner of the house. I want to re-evaluate their cultural and patrimonial importance.
Therefore, based on a corpus of photographs dating from the end of the 19th century to the 1950s, Odyssey follows a precise protocol. Having scanned and enlarged the pictures, I transfer them manually onto printed fabrics--
these embody for me the plurality of the cultural, traditional and symbolic patterns. Also their interconnections, their processes and the transformations the journey creates.
Hawai’i has been linked with Europe and Asia since it was discovered by Westerners. Japanese immigrants’ re-interpreted European cloths (Gingham, Vichy - called Palka in Hawai’I) were used as working clothes. Later they used kimono fabric for the Aloha shirts and sold them in Hawai’i.
For me the shapes, patterns, images and words used for these fabric are not merely ornamental. I was born and raised in cultures haunted by signs and shapes. The superimposition in my works of photographs and fabrics
(pattern, drawing, sign) attempts to modify the spectator’s viewpoint on the subject matters and materials I use.
The exhibition was shown at the Honolulu museum of art .
http://honolulumuseum.org/art/exhibitions/13988-first_h/
Month of photography at paris
http://www.mep-fr.org/evenement/miki-nitadori/