Murray Guy
453 West 17th Street, 212-463-7372
Chelsea
January 12 - February 23, 2008
Reception: Saturday, January 12, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site
Murray Guy is delighted to announce their second solo exhibition of works by Noriko Furunishi.
Furunishi’s recent works portray the drama of the great American landscape. In this new series, Furunishi turns away from the vibrant colors of Southern California and presents a world almost entirely in black and white. Ice Park, shot in the snowy peaks of Colorado, is a group of seven images that make up one single panoramic tableau, but are each discrete photographs.
Furunishi’s pictures seem to unravel Western conventions of landscape depictions. Rather than horizontal, they have a vertical orientation and lack a horizon line, sharing something with traditional Japanese and Chinese landscape painting. Digital tapestries stitched together from views taken at varying distance and perspective, their field of vision is compressed and the images are uniformly high-definition. Rather than provide a fixed point of view, they invite the viewer’s eye to wander restlessly across the photograph, allowing the image to recede freely and advance.
In their topsy-turvy dismissal of a single, coherent perspective, Furunishi’s photographs radically destabilize our experience of the world, challenging our natural assumption that the earth beneath our feet is enduring and immutable.
Noriko Furunishi was born in 1966 in Kobe, Japan. She received a BFA from the Pratt Institute, NY and an MFA from UCLA. Her work has been exhibited in Ecotopia, the Second ICP Triennale of Photography and Video at the International Center for Photography, New York, Landscape: New Acquisitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Super Vision, ICA Boston, Picturing Modernity: The Photography Collection , San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whose Nature? What’s Nature?, Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Distinct Impressions: Photographs from the Permanent Collection, Palm Springs Art Museum, Global Anxieties: Nine Perspectives on a Changing Planet , The College of Wooster Art Museum. Noriko Furunishi lives and works in Los Angeles.