Yuichiro Tamura created a sensation with his road movie Nightless (winner of the excellence award at the 2010 Japan Media Arts Festival), made by stitching together images taken from Google Street View. He has consistently pursued the possibilities of the moving image, taking photography as a point of departure while straddling various other media and frameworks, including film, installation, and performance. Tamura samples not only images that he has taken himself but also preexisting footage, coaxing unique relationships out of them in order to create new landscapes. The form of these works varies from installations that incorporate elements of bodily presence and experience, as well as performances that draw the spectator in.

“Nightland”, Tamura’s first solo show at YUKA TSURUNO will showcase a new installation that further expands on various notions explored in Nightless. Previous projects showcased a wide range of novel approaches – Nightless (Tamura’s graduation project at Tokyo University of the Arts, 2010) went beyond screen-based projections, incorporating an actual Cadillac into the space of the installation, while Talelight (2010, Yokohama Civic Gallery Azamino) features a story told by a taxi driver that unravels out of a series of images. Composed of Google Street View photographs taken in daylight, Nightless is an imaginary voyage into a world with no concept of night.

While invoking the shifts that have occurred in modes of transportation and movement throughout human history – from pilgrimages, crusades, vacations, railways, automobiles, and airplanes – this exhibition brings together a collection of images that visualize the earth, a consciousness of these images through our actual experience of the world, and a history of the earth that emerges from these movements and migrations. On display will be an installation that includes a new version of Nightless that takes its starting point from Clermont-Ferrand in France.

“The realization that you can’t fall asleep, wrapped up in the thin inflight blanket and bathed in the faint light leaking from the turned-down shade of the airplane window – is this some sort of waking dream, stranded in between day and night?”