NYAB Event - Bianca Sforni “Trees from the Pacific Shores”

Bianca Sforni “Trees from the Pacific Shores”

MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects

This event has ended.

Trees from the Pacific Shores is the first public exhibition of seven photographic prints dedicatedto the artist’s earlier black-and- white tree series. The trees in this series are isolated against a velvety black background, revealing the naturally ephemeral character and fantastical qualities inherent in their awe-inspiring physical forms.

Bianca Sforni had spent an extended period of time in Los Angeles - a city with balconies facing eastward over the shores of the Pacific - when she became motivated, by curiosity, to fly across the ocean to the island of Cipango (Italian for Japan, Marco Polo, Il Milione, circa 1300). Sforni immediately gravitated to cycads, a tree species distantly related to the palm tree, in their winter robes (komomaki). These odd and somewhat surreal forms became the subject of From Cipango I-V, 2003. Set alone or in a group, Sforni’s quirky images demonstrate the artist’s taste for the unknown, animated with a touch of sly humor.

Hollywood Juniper, 2002, in contrast, is an old pine tree with gracefully manicured branches. A seemingly gigantic botanical wonder, the depicted majestic juniper is actually a third-generation bonsai tended by several experts over many years. Juniper I, 2002, meanwhile, displays a slender and soaring trunk with few branches. Here, the artist blurs the details, creating a ghostly abstraction of axis mundi, a link between the underworld into which the roots plunge; and the celestial spheres, toward which the branches stretch.

According to the Shinto tradition in Japan, trees are the natural residence of kami, or spirits.Concurrent with the tree-worshipping cults that flourished in both Eastern and Western cultures, the tradition of miniaturizing trees was also carried from Japan to the western world soon after the cultures began interacting. Just as Sforni’s photographs construct a theoretical bridge between the Pacific shores of California and Japan in terms of spirituality and scale, they can also be seen as a memorial to those Japanese-American citizens and resident aliens who were interned in California during World War II.

Bianca Sforni, (born 1963, Milan), lives and works in New York. Sforni’s work has been exhibited throughout North America and Europe, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (MACRO); Museum of European Photography in Paris (MEP); The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; The Pool NYC; Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery, New York; and Galerie Emanuel Perrotin, Paris. Solo exhibitions were held at Claudia Gian Ferrari Arte Contemporanea, Milan; Yoshii Gallery, New York; Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York; and Galerie Eric Mircher, Paris.