Forever(and again)
January 14 ― July 6, 2018
Izu Photo Museum is delighted to stage Forever (and again), an exhibition of works primarily from our permanent collection. From day to day we encounter many different people, and from time to time, we are parted from them by death. The relentless flow of time, heedless of the lives and deaths of individuals, cannot be resisted, and in its face, we may feel powerless. Yet even when one life comes to an end, memories etched deep in the heart are passed on by those left behind, living on with new meaning. Capturing a moment in the ongoing flow of time, photographs reflect the accumulated past and reawaken in the viewer stories in the form of memories. Works by five contemporary artists—Shizuka Yokomizo, Rika Noguchi, Rinko Kawauchi, Yurie Nagashima, and Terri Weifenbach—will offer opportunities to ponder the links between time and memory, and the nature of permanence.

About the works

Shizuka Yokomizo
A fresh take on the concept of time, Forever (and again) is Yokomizo’s first work to be shown at a museum for seven years

Yokomizo’s work on video, which juxtaposes and projects scenes of four elderly ladies in Britain playing a Chopin waltz, and views of their rooms and gardens, reflects the cumulative time they have lived, and the persistence of time, ending and starting all over again, like a round in which the main melody disappears and reappears over and over. Through Chopin’s waltz—music that has been around longer than the ladies—Yokomizo urges the viewer to consider the ephemeral yet eternal nature of time.

Shizuka Yokomizo’s artist statement
What I tried to evoke by placing the contrasting footage of each lady’s dynamic performance, and scenes almost completely motionless, alongside each other, and repeating them, was transience and permanence, and most of all my own undeniable experience of time, as I stand before the screen.

Shizuka Yokomizo, Forever (and again), 2003, Video installation
© Shizuka Yokomizo © GEIJUTSU SHINCHO photo: Tatsuro Hirose, Courtesy of Wako Works of Art

Rika Noguchi
First Japanese museum outing for To the Night Planet, capturing the light-filled streets of Berlin

Noguchi, who has produced numerous works on the theme of light, shot a complete roll of film out the window of a bus she rode regularly in Berlin while there. Starlight is delivered from the past of stars a vast distance away, to the earth of the future. Filled with light in diverse forms, the nighttime streets of Berlin were at once familiar to Noguchi, and at the same time resembled starlight heading toward a future not yet upon us. As she captures the lightscapes that leap in quick succession into the viewfinder, that light lures the viewer into a different world embracing both past and future.

Rika Noguchi To the Night Planet
At the end of the day, I was looking at the view from the window of a double decker bus that I always took. There were many different colored lights shinning in the darkened street. The bus was gently running into the space of the night planet. As I set my camera close to the window, the landscape of the light flew into the finder one after the other. Every moment felt to me as a candid moment so I clicked away.
By laying down all of what has been photographed in one film on one bus ride, in chronological order, I found out that I better remembered the moments that were not photographed. Then I thought the secret of photographs may have been there.

Rika Noguchi, To the Night Planet #18, 2015, Chromogenic print
© Noguchi Rika, Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery

Rinko Kawauchi
Cui Cui—thirteen years of family photos

Cui Cui consists of photos taken by Kawauchi of her own family over a period of thirteen years. “Cui Cui” is French for the chirping of a small bird, and is also the “say cheese” equivalent when taking photographs. Vegetables harvested from the garden, gentle shafts of sunlight shining into rooms, and other everyday scenes as natural and uncontrived as the tweeting of that little bird, intersect with major life events symbolized by commemorative photographs—some taken on the cue “Cui Cui”—such as a brother’s wedding, the death of her grandfather, and the birth of a baby; forming layer upon layer of family memories.

From Rinko Kawauchi’s photobook Cui Cui
Until I was fifteen, there were eight of us in the family.
One died, then another, and now my grandmother lives by herself in Shiga, my parents together in Osaka, my older brother has started his own family, and my younger brother and I each live alone in Tokyo. . . .
Time passes equally for all, and the shape of the family changes.
I can never return to being part of a family of eight, but nor will I ever forget growing up loved and protected by the adults around me.
Those memories will sustain me until the day I die.

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, from the series of Cui Cui, 2005, Chromogenic print
© Rinko Kawauchi

Yurie Nagashima
SWISS – inspired by photos of her late grandmother

SWISS consists of day-to-day photographs taken by Nagashima during time as an artist-in-residence in Switzerland with her son in 2007. Two decades after the death of her grandmother, a keen gardener, Nagashima came upon a small box containing bundles of colorful flower photos taken by the older lady. Seemingly ordinary flower shots preserve the viewpoint of a grandmother with a conscientious affection for flowers, and twenty years after her death, these photos at last began to tell Nagashima the story of her grandmother’s past. With her late grandmother in mind, through flowers, Nagashima engages with people, turns her thoughts to those far away, and through the garden of her Swiss home and flowers blooming nearby, conveys a delicate engagement with the people she loves, as a mother and a woman.

From Nagashima Yurie’s photobook SWISS
My thoughts, like flowers, start to fade, then try to bloom once more
When I’m hanging out the washing
Or listening to my child talking
Those thoughts are always breathing, quietly but resolutely
In some place so deep light never reaches

Yurie Nagashima, Untitled 2, from SWISS, 2007, Chromogenic print
© Yurie Nagashima, Courtesy of Maho Kubota Gallery

Terri Weifenbach
Kakita River springs –Observing the cycle of life in the gushing of springwater

To make Kakita River springs Weifenbach, whose work captures familiar landscapes in nature, combined photos and video footage taken during a stay in Shizuoka in 2015. Here gently flowing water is presented as washing away the past in the manner of the ceaseless flow of time. In the endlessly flowing water, and the tiny leaf that persists as it is swirled around by that flow, Weifenbach identifies nature beginning to change as soon as it emerges, and the vicissitudes of life. The sequence photographs taken in the same location are snapshots of nature’s constant morphing, showing the paths of flowing water like spun thread, and the wealth of expression in nature, via light and shade.

Terri Weifenbach
This water flows past finding its way to the sea.
Unwatched, gone, now it could be mist.

Terri Weifenbach, Kakita River springs,
2015, Chromogenic prints, Video
© Terri Weifenbach


Profiles

Shizuka Yokomizo
Born 1966 in Tokyo; currently based in London. After receiving her BA in philosophy from Chuo University in Tokyo, she went on to complete the Foundation Course at Kent Institute of Art and Design, a BFA in sculpture at Chelsea College of Art and Design, and an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London. Major group shows include 100 Stories about Love (21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa, 2009), Touch of Image (Yokohama Civic Art Gallery Azamino, Yokohama, Kanagawa, 2011), Artist File 2015 (The National Art Center, Tokyo; 2015), and Japanese Photography from Postwar to Now (SF MOMA, San Francisco, 2016).

Rika Noguchi
Born 1971 in Saitama Prefecture. Graduated from the Department of Photography, College of Art at Nihon University. Having based her practice in Berlin for 12 years from 2004, she currently lives and works in Okinawa. Her major solo shows include MIMOCA’s Eye Vol. 1: Noguchi Rika—A Feeling of Something Happening (Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, 2001), I Dreamt of Flying: Noguchi Rika (Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2004), Color of the Planet (DAAD Gallery, Berlin, 2006), and Light Reaching the Future (IZU PHOTO MUSEUM, Shizuoka, 2011). Major group shows include The Door into Summer—The Age of Micropop (Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki, 2007), Yokohama Triennale 2011, and Saitama Triennale (2016).

Rinko Kawauchi
Born 1972 in Shiga Prefecture. Recipient of the pretigious 27th Kimura Ihei Award in 2002 for her two books Utatane and Hanabi (both Little More, 2001); the ICP 25th Annual Infinity Award, Art Category in 2009; and in 2013, both the 63rd Art Encouragement Prize for New Artist from the Japanese Ministry of Education and the 29th Higashikawa Award, Domestic Photographer Award. Among her published photo collections are Cui Cui (Foil, 2005), Illuminance (Foil / Aperture, 2011), Ametsuchi (Aperture / Seigensha, 2013), and Halo (HeHe / Aperture, 2017). Her long list of solo exhibitions includes Illuminance, Ametsuchi, Seeing Shadow, (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2012) and The river embraced me (Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, 2016).

Yurie Nagashima
Born 1973 in Tokyo. Received her BFA at Musashino Art University, Tokyo; MFA at California Institute of the Arts; and MA from the School of Humanities, Musashi University, Tokyo. Recipient of the PARCO Prize at URBANART #2 in 1993 and the 26th Kimura Ihei Award in 2001 for her photo book PASTIME PARADISE (Madra, 2000). Other published photo collections include A Family (Korinsha, 1988), SWISS (Akaaka, 2010) and 5 Comes After 6 (Match, 2014).
Among her recent solo exhibitions are And a Pinch of Irony with a Hint of Love (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2017).

Terri Weifenbach
Born 1957 in New York City, USA. Weifenbach launched her photography practice in the 1970s after majoring in fine arts at the University of Maryland.
Her photo books include In Your Dreams (1997), Hunter Green (2000), Lana (2002), and Between Maple and Chestnut (2012). She held the exhibition Gift at IMA Gallery (Tokyo) together with Rinko Kawauchi in 2014. She currently teaches at Georgetown University, and was recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015. Izu Photo Museum (Shizuoka) held her solo exhibition Terri Weifenbach The May Sun in 2017.

Related events
●Talk events
Saturday, January 20: A conversation between
Takashi Honma (photographer) and Rika Noguchi
Sunday, March 11: A conversation between
Rinko Kawauchi and Yurie Nagashima
Time : 14: 30–16: 30
Place: Clematis no Oka Hall (a two-minute walk from the Museum)
Admission free with a same-day ticket to the exhibition
Seats: 150 per talk, first-come basis.
Please enquire by phone at 055-989-8780 (closed Wednesdays)

●Gallery talks by the curator
Date/time: Second and fourth Saturdays of each month at 14:15 (runs approx. 30 minutes)
Admission free with a same-day ticket to the exhibition
No booking necessary. Please gather at the museum counter at the above-mentioned date and time.

●Photographers’ Workshop
See the website for details: www.izuphoto-museum.jp

Related book
Forever (and again)
Scheduled for publication in January 2018
Published by NOHARA Bilingual: Japanese and English