SPROUT Curation is delighted to announce the “Daughters of the Lonesome Isle” an exhibition of Marlene Marino and Makoto Taniguchi.
“Daughters of the Lonesome Isle” takes its title from a work for prepared piano by John Cage. Although the exhibition focuses on the woman, the themes like “loneliness/freedom’” or “utopia/dystopia” are serious and familiar to all humans across gender and race today where demonstrations take place throughout the world and political situations is rapidly changing.
When the art confronts such a profound theme, what would be possible in curation as a form of expression? This exhibition is also an attempt to this question.
About the Artists
Marlene Marino
The photographer Marlene Marino grew up in Virginia as a daughter of a Cuban refugee and Colombian immigrant.
Cuba –the Caribbean Sea and the bright sky, although not so rich as a country, is a paradise far from the clutches of capitalism. However, the images inspired by Buena Vista Social Club or novels of Ryu Murakami occasionally make beautiful misunderstanding.
Cuba’s images by Marino, contrary to the image of the peaceful Caribbean, show another mysterious presence: a politically isolated paradise where Cuban citizens live in obscurity, almost resigning to their fate to be tossed by diplomacy with US.
She has become known in the world with her project “Cuba 2009”, a series that reflects the experience in her family’s homeland where the photographer spent living and working with women of same generation during a few weeks, which Purple published this chronicle as a special edition to the magazine.
During the trips to Cuba, Colombia, Japan and Israel, the women captured in her camera are shining beautifully, seesawing between alienation and liberty caused by the countries where they live in and politics in their time.
In this first show of Marlene Marino in Japan, she presents an intimate story by the original gelatin print series of “KaoRi”, the name of a girl known as a muse of the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki.
Profile of Marlene Marino (Virginia, United States)
Studied art and philosophy in New York before launching her photographic practice in 1999. Marino published the project Cuba 2009 as a supplement to the French publication Purple Magazine. She is working with a lot of media of all over the world such as Purple Fashion, AnOther, Apartamento, DAZED & CONFUSED and Hobo magazine.
Marino is currently working on a photo book with the art book publisher Rizzoli for 2012.
Makoto Taniguchi
The mirror reflects a Japanese animation like girls’ curious expression, which we cannot look from the front –Makoto Taniguchi’s series of painting on mirror has caught attention in the Japanese art world by introducing a new perspective to the technique of painting.
When we confront the work entitled “Not yet titled”, we would only see the trace of paint directly put on an acrylic board, which is almost emptiness, speaks nothing to us itself. However, once we look it from an angle again, the girl appears in front of us for the first time then we notice that the girl lives in a world of fantasy, a different layer from the reality where we live in.
World reflected in the mirror=fantasy and empty trace of paint=reality, while they present at the same time, we can never see them simultaneously. As we seek a peace in a world of fantasy (=reflection of the mirror), the girl seems no longer to come back to the real world.
Taniguchi’s another attempting series is a still image extracted from a sequence of an ephemeral, vagueness girl fixed on a silk screen on which sparkle glitter is sprinkled all over. The lame particles that dazzle the spectator: each brilliance of particle, in order to induce the object from the movement of the time axis to the deepness of the image, intentionally changed from video to still image.
We are drawn into the luscious and euphoric world of Taniguchi’s girls unawares.
Profile of Makoto Taniguchi (b.1982, Tokyo)
Graduated with M.F.A from Inter Media Art, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.
He participated “neoneo Part1 [boys]” at Takahashi collection Hibiya (Tokyo), as one of the young talented artists who follow the “neoteny japan”(The Ueno Royal Museum / Takahashi Collection Hibiya, Tokyo). He is often introduced as one of the most talented artists in the 2010s. Beyond the art world, he has being appraised borderless from fashion to technology.
An important solo exhibition “Anime”(means animation in Japanese) was held at SUNDAY ISSUE, Tokyo in 2011.
