DISQUIET
"Disquiet" combines 38 of my photographic works on traditional Japanese papers with a pair of the iconic safety-pin sculptures of artist Tamiko Kawata.
Layers of memory, history, friendship, and artistic process intersect in telling this story of a longing for safe ground. My images include botanic studies, a gun range in Brooklyn, large scale Alaskan carbon damage photographs, and reinterpreted Japanese glass negatives from the 1930's which portray a haunting world frozen in amber.
I met Tamiko in her Manhattan studio in 2019, during the pandemic. We bonded over a respect for nature and a love for the industrial detritus of New York City. She was born in Kobe, Japan in 1936, emigrating to New York in 1962.
"Disquiet" was first exhibited at the Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, New York from October 2022-January 2023.
"Many photographs in this exhibit feature troubling topics; carbon-damaged glaciers, a gun-toting young woman, numerous bullet holes sprayed across a firing range wall. But be still with the works. Linger in the raw cement warehouse where they are housed. And a more complex message emerges: the create art in these disquieting times is a defiant act of hope. Viewing the black and white phots and Kawata's safety-pin sculptures through this lens makes their shapes and shadows take on a daring beauty all their own" - Evantheia Schibsted