Osaka-based installation artist Tomoko Inagaki in her first New York solo show, Dune/Trip.

Tomoko Inagaki’s artworks explore the boundaries between fantasy and reality in contemporary, postwar, post-bubble Japan. Her installation Dune/Trip consists of newspapers, magazines and other media detritus buried under formless piles of sand. A staircase, also made of sand, emerges from this wasteland to abut a looped video projection of a girl wearing white clothes, her face expressionless, eternally descending a staircase to pause at that liminal point where the imagined world meets an immediate world of information and materiality. These two worlds, so similar and yet different, are separated by only the most delicate boundary.

Exhibited along with a sketch that provides the basis for Dune/Trip, Inagaki’s installation presents a frail and beautiful layer of difference, drawing attention to the difficulties inherent in delineating fact from fiction, and in so doing, making us feel once more the possibility of dreaming.

Inagaki includes a second video piece, White Color, for this exhibition, wherein she explores the uncertainties of boundary-making from a different perspective.

Currently based in Osaka, Tomoko Inagaki earned her BA in Fine Arts at Middlesex University, UK. She has exhibited widely in galleries, museums, and alternative spaces in Japan and Europe, including Art Tower Mito (Japan), Gunma Museum of Art (Japan), Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima (Japan), The Arches Gallery (UK), and Krinzinger Projekte (Vienna). She has been awarded the Ray Finnis Trust Award in 1999 (UK), and the Fifth Shiseido ADSP in 2002 (Japan).