Annely Juda Fine Art is delighted to announce a new exhibition entitled Through from artist Yuko Shiraishi. Through presents a series of exquisite recent paintings and a major new architectural installation; ‘Bunk Bed Odyssey - Parallel Lullaby’.
Shiraishi is recognised for her abstract canvases with delicate layered brushwork and transparent washes revealing nuances of light and colour in bands or carefully placed dots and circles. New paintings in this exhibition reference Shiraishi’s long-standing fascination with dreams, which spans the scientific and the poetic and goes beyond the dreams we remember.
‘Bunk Bed Odyssey - Parallel Lullaby’ is a new installation work in Shiraishi’s ongoing ‘Imaginary Architectural Project’ series which includes previous works: ‘Space Elevator Tea House’, ‘Confession Box’ ‘Ancient Egyptian Tomb’ and ‘pass age’. This new piece examines the space that exists between two people sleeping on a bunk bed; they might be family, friends or strangers – and the location a house, train, ship, prison, hotel or school - physically occupying the same space but in their sleep, dreams taking them to completely different places. Shiraishi has said previously that her installation works also tap directly into her interests in the theory of the universe, architecture, space, humans and history and cites a multitude of influences spanning her Japanese cultural heritage, Taoist philosophy and western influences including science fiction writers and film makers such as Arthur C Clarke The Fountains of Paradise theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Stanley Kubric’s 2001 A Space Odyssey. With ‘Bunk Bed Odyssey - Parallel Lullaby’ Shiraishi says that the idea for this work came directly to her in a dream…
“When it appeared in my dreams, I’m sure during REM sleep - and when I woke up it was completely visualised and it was quite clear to me that I should make this piece. At the same time parallel to this I had another dream which was for a gallery space in Tokyo… These two pieces are definitely related with dreams. My approach about dreams is not too Freudian or Jungian, I enjoy more an approach like folklore and myth, or Argentinian writer Borges whose idea of a dream is something like a parallel universe or a multiple universe. When you sleep your brain is much more activated than when you’re awake, so sometimes you’re shocked by your emotion when you’re sleeping, but when you awake you can’t remember. I just open a window for creation through dreaming…When you are looking at everything - information comes to your eyes and you are stimulated or disappointed, or your emotions are. Visual things create a lot of memories, and the mixture of your daytime visible reality and the invisible realities - I want to have both in my work”
The exhibition will be on our fourth floor and will run from 26 September – 2nd November. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies this exhibition including an interview between artist Suzanne Treister and Yuko Shiraishi, which can be viewed online here.
