Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present “You are always on my mind / you are always in my heart; photo-painting and photo collage, 1976-1981,” a solo exhibition of Kunie Sugiura. This will be Kunie Sugiura’s first solo exhibition at Taka Ishii Gallery. It will include 6 photo collages along with 9 photo-paintings, produced in the late 70′s to early 80′s. The title “You are always on my mind / you are always in my heart” is inspired by Willie Nelson song “Always on my mind” released in 1982.

Sugiura enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1963, studying under the direction of conceptual photographer Kenneth Josephson, and after more than 40 years she continues to explore a diversity of photographic expressions.  After experimenting with color photography in the 60′s and combining acrylic paint with photography on canvas in the 70′s, Sugiura began producing photograms in the 80′s using subjects of everyday life; each group utilized different materials and techniques while the artist’s goals and gaze remained consistent.

New modes of visualization often come from new crossing of media, technologies — like photography and painting, photography and sculpture and video and photography.  Their unexpected and unpredictable consequences bring new expressions.

I can accept both photography and painting as both real and abstract ways to produce a complete, whole vision.
- Text by Kunie Sugiura

In Sugiura’s concept, the immateriality of light, time, and the transience of nature can be found and shared in attempts in art and literature. The result is a contradiction between improvised and constructed elements while they nonetheless readily co-exist. While continuously pursuing the relationship between photography and other media like painting and drawing, she has been interested in both photography’s ‘objectivity’ and its abstract. Sugiura’s unique approach to visualize the unattainable rests and evokes against the background of the Japanese identity, its culture, and aesthetics.

*image (left)
Kunie Sugiura 
Connecticut, 1979,
Photographic emulsion, acrylic on canvas and wood, 114.3 x 109.2 cm 
courtesy of the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery