Kunie Sugiura: Dark Matters / Light Affairs

As flowers, kittens, fish, frogs, X-rays and shadows leave their fleeting marks on photographic paper, Kunie Sugiura transforms them into stunning works of art that echo stone-age cave paintings and the traditional Japanese arts of object arrangement just as much as 20th century minimalism and the body art of Yves Klein and Robert Rauschenberg.Her photograms and photogrammatic sculptures are extremely startling, because, unlike their near relative, the traditional photograph, they are both not-here and here, not-now and now. By deliberately turning back the clock to the earliest era in photo history, Sugiura reminds us of the fragile, slight foundation upon which the triumph of the reproductive regime rests. While the photogram has been superseded by an ever-expanding arsenal of photographic equipment, it continues to express, as no camera image can, photography's audacity in annexing the elemental truths told by the sun. Color reproductions and essays by Bill Arning and Joel Smith evoke the magic of Sugiura's work like the fading imprint of a lily's shadow.… (more)