Kumi Oguro
New works

8/9 - 14/10

Opening 8 september 17h

By attaching a small glass plate in front of a digital (video)camera, this apparatus goes back, in terms of atmosphere, to the pioneer phase of image making. Already for a long time Kumi Oguro is fascinated by the expressive potential of the unsharpness, especially in her portraits that were realized with a simple camera obscura (pinhole camera). Also in the video piece ‘Poor Little Creatures’ this subjectivity dominates and the actions passes on discontinuously by which a relationship with psychic subconscious process occurs. This impression is intensified since the eyes of the portrayed people stay closed most of the time. Besides, the action is slightly slowed down and the opening of the eyes evokes the impression of awakening. In spite of this slumbering state, the lips keeps on gesticulating all the time, but the sound doesn’t penetrate. The inaudible language seems to be no longer wanting to grasp the reality and is restricted to an expressive gesture. Not only in her use of a digital video camera but also in the action that is recorded with it, the artist shows us the elementary grammar of image and communication.

Kumi Oguro develops a special photographic oeuvre in which female personages enter into alienating dialogue with their environments. Oguro stages her images carefully with extraordinary attention to the use of light and detail. We seem to catch the characters just before or just after something apparently absurd or tragic has happened.

Sometimes Oguro’s images are composed almost in the manner of classic-painting with Vermeer-like falling spread light, then they have the unconventional framing of a quickly made snapshot. This is not an oeuvre that desperately searches for innovation or spectacle, but finds own accents exactly out of the pictorial tradition.