Reggie Shiobara “Weather Fronts”

Sannga Gallery

poster for Reggie Shiobara “Weather Fronts”
[Image: “Untitled” (TKO_001), (2013/2016) Digital C Print 30 x 40 in. © Reggie Shiobara]

This event has ended.

Sannga Gallery presents Weather Fronts, a solo exhibition by Japanese photographer Reggie Shiobara. The exhibition features over eighty color images taken by Shiobara between 2013 and 2015 in the U.S., Europe, and throughout Japan including his mother’s hometown, Chiba. Selected from his ongoing photography series, Weather Fronts marks Shiobara’s first solo exhibition in New York. The photographs in the installation construct a cognitive attitude toward the current media landscape.

This exhibition focuses on Shiobara’s activities after 2013, when he began traveling Eastern Europe to find imagined pre-WWI scenes, moving to Central and Western Europe, and finally through the U.S. and Japan. The photographs shown are taken during this period, yet he does not disclose the exact location. He presents a variety of images such as flowers, graves, trees, rainbows, walls and reflections that become in “reality” through his lens. According to Shiobara, “As in our social media landscape, there is no front or rear in my photographs. However, this space can be figuratively shown like weather fronts you probably sense everyday.”

Recently, Shiobara has drawn his attention to activities seeking an alternative perspective and interpretation to our current social media situation through questioning how possibly people can ‘touch” reality through the camera lens —as the Internet erases the interfacial boundary between reality and virtuality. Susan Sontag once remarked that in the 20th century people can only see reality through a lens. However today, virtuality exceeds reality even more, especially after September 11, 2001, when people in the world experienced the surrealism in which there is no clear line between reality and virtuality. There would be no front, nor rear battle line for reality anymore after seeing the twin towers collapse in the middle of the city in such an intense moment.

Since moving to New York in 2009, Shiobara worked as an assistant photographer for Annie Leibovitz, who has been a significant figure in American portrait photography since 1970’s. Best known for her representation of beauty and contradiction in the world, her indelible portraits have captured celebrities, intimate family moments (including the birth of her daughter at age of 51), the death of her partner Susan Sontag’s death and even war documentation.

Reggie Shiohara was born in Chiba, Japan in 1978. He received his BFA and MFA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2008. He moved to New York in 2009 and started his career under the instruction by Annie Leibovitz. He got numerous awards and fellowships including the U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Program (2014), the Overseas Study Program for Artists, the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japanese Government (2013) and the Pola Art Foundation Fellowship (2009). His group exhibitions include “Vivid Material”, The University of Museum, Tokyo (2008), “Still & Move”, Forest Hall Hashimoto, Kanagawa (2004), “Project the Projectors“, Former Sakuragawa Public School, Tokyo (2004) and “Garden”, Suzuki Gallery , Kyoto (2002)

Media

Schedule

from April 21, 2016 to May 28, 2016

Closing Reception on 2016-05-28 from 17:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Reggie Shiobara

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