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11/1/2008

Two exhibitions

Murray Guy Gallery, New York

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.

PATRICIA ESQUIVIAS’ videos Folklore I and Folklore II are the first of an ongoing series of informative lectures about Spain, its history and image. Folklore deals with events of historic relevance and parallel stories recorded in the collective “folk” memory. Employing modest aesthetics and unrehearsed speech to narrate these stories, Esquivias weaves together unrelated facts presenting history-making as a democratic, continuous, permeable and participatory activity. In fact the lecture is seen through the eyes and hands of the lecturer. We follow her manually selecting and reselecting a scrapbook of visual images, consulting hand written notes and watching the clock. In Folklore I (2006), Esquivias continually returns to two distinct threads. Commencing with the 36 year dictatorship in Spain, she enters the personal trajectory of Franco protégé Jesús Gil who abuses his position of minor power, amasses a small fortune, purchases a soccer club and dies, after betting that he could eat twenty fried eggs in one go. The other narrative follows the rise and decline of rave music events in Valencia, which began some years after Franco’s death on 1975. However, of the apparently liberating parties that took place, we mostly learn about the drug abuse and tragic road accidents that accompanied them.

Folklore II (2007) draws similarities between King Phillip II of Spain (1527-1598) and Julio Iglesias and global empires then and now. Once again mixing historical facts about Phillip II’s reign and tabloid gossip about Iglesias and his private life, Esquivias takes us on an educational journey from the dark isolated Spain of Franco’s reign to the sun-drenched Spain of present day mass tourism.

Born in 1979 in Caracas, Patricia Esqivias received her BA at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London and her MFA at California College of Arts, San Francisco. She has exhibited at the Kunstverein Frankfurt, Museo Raúl Anguiano, Guadalajara, México, EASTinternational, Norwich, UK and will participate in the 2008 Berlin Biennale. She is a recent recipient of the EASTinternational Award and the Illy Present Future Award at Artissima 2007 in Turin, Italy. This is her first exhibition at Murray Guy.

Concurrent with this exhibition, Patricia Esquivias has a White Room solo show at White Columns, New York.

Opening reception Saturday January 12, 6 – 8 pm

Murray Guy Gallery
453 West 17 Street - New York
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10am – 6pm

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