NYAB Event - Emi Anrakuji "A Decent Life"

Emi Anrakuji "A Decent Life"

MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects

This event has ended.

Miyako Yoshinaga art prospects presents A Decent Life, an exhibition of new work by Emi Anrakuji. This is the artist’s third solo presentation at the gallery.

In A Decent Life, a new series of over forty photographs, Tokyo-based artist Emi Anrakuji continues her cinematic investigation of voyeuristic dream-states. As in her past work, the photographs feature the artist as subject. But unlike her previous series, in which she interspersed various timeframes and locations, this new work presents several sets of a defined time and place, giving the collection a distinctive narrative quality. As a result, the series has a stylistic resemblance to cinema stills, with each photograph capturing a fleeting frame from a world that exists somewhere between the real world and fantasy. In particular, the black & white photographs, which were shot at night, exude a mysterious, foreboding quality that recalls both the film noir and horror genres.

“I live in two worlds,” says Anrakuji, describing both her dual position as artist and subject as well as her interest in the space where reality and fiction meet. “Both are chaotic, uncertain, pathetically painful and utterly decent.”

Using her own body as a catalyst for narrative exploration, Anrakuji illustrates two worlds in A Decent Life — day and night. Under a bright beam of sunlight or shrouded in dim streetlight, the artist crouches amid empty bus seats, drinks from a tiny medicine bottle and wanders through the streets, wraithlike, in a white dress. Ambiguity reigns supreme in the enigmatic and eroticized world that Anrakuji has constructed. In some images, her ritualistic gestures evoke the behavior of a spirit medium, channeling the realm of the mystical, the alchemical and the paranormal.

In training her lens on herself as a meticulously crafted persona existing in a subliminal state, Anrakuji negotiates a chaotic, emotional and ultimately sensual terrain that is governed more by intuition and subconscious desire than by logic or necessity, presenting a surrogate for a person caught between worlds, meandering through strange yet oddly familiar environments that for all intents and purposes, may very well have been concocted in a dream.

[Image: Emi AnrakujiApron "147 (detail)" (2011) gelatin silver print]