“If the accident will” by MIZUKAMI Emi from 20230429 to 20230528
Ritsuki Fujisaki Gallery is pleased to announce “If The Accident Will,” a solo exhibition by MIZUKAMI Emi from April 29 to May 28, 2023.
Artist website
Fatal power of narrative
The title “If The Accident Will” is quoted from Kurt Vonnegut’s science fiction novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five” (1969) which says “I hope that we’ll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will.”
In the novel, the main character, Billy, travels through time and space to a forest in Dresden during World War II, a penthouse in postwar America, and a zoo on a planet created by aliens on the planet Tralfamador, and realizes his life with being liberated from free will.
The exhibition consists of eleven paintings and two sculptures.
MIZUKAMI’s paintings depict narratives created by quoting, altering, and originalizing images from various regions and periods, which she then paints over several times with sand from the Namib Desert.
First, each of MIZUKAMI’s works has a different time-space ≒ verse. In that world, all kinds of narratives, such as the Iliad, One Thousand and One Nights, Chronicles of the Dead, myths and stories from the East and West like Slaughterhouse 5, thought experiments like Buridan’s donkey, rope magic, card games, nuclear weapon(Little boy), dragon tails, etc., are flatly cited, modified and each narratives is composed layer by layer, with some parts painted over by sand and others remaining on the surface. “Erased de Kooning Drawing” (Robert Rauschenberg, 1953) is a work of art in which the drawing is partially erased, leaving traces that are intended to return the original drawing paper to the state in which it was produced. This is intended to return the original drawing paper to the state in which it was produced.
What about the Namibian sand that makes up the space between the layers? MIZUKAMI focuses on the materiality of the sand of the Namib Desert that cancels out the multiple information and paints it holds. Desert sands are constantly moving and colliding with each other. The chimerical creation of myths, in which some parts are added and others discarded through geographical and linguistic expanses, seems to approximate the nature of the desert sand.
The various myths and stories cited in the work, as well as the narratives generated by Mizukami himself, can be categorized as banana myths, but the residues of these myths and narratives that appear in the present section (the foreground of the painting) and the sand itself, which can be seen in places, appear to be unifying at first glance. The lack of uniformity is due to the various kinds of sand. This lack of unity is a cross-section that has emerged as a result of various times and choices, and it represents the complexity of the world we are confronted with and its total lack of visibility. When we focus on the vector, it indicates the gradual approach of the narrative toward the viewer. It is truly a human figure confronting the history of a world created by MIZUKAMI.
The title of this exhibition was initially proposed as “Poo-tee-weet. These are the words uttered by a little bird at the end of the aforementioned “Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death” (1969). The sense of impermanence in which meaningless words destroy the peace of mind and scheduled harmony based on fatalism is a feeling that pervades all of MIZUKAMI’s work.
