Since arriving in the U.S. from Japan in 1963, Kunié Sugiura has created innovative works that expand the usesof photography while exploring its relationship with drawing and painting. The exhibition focuses on a series of collages created from 1977 to 1981, exhibited here for the first time.
Sugiura combined her own deadpan snapshots of urban architecture, interiors, and suburban landscapes in color and black & white, with monochrome panels of exposed photo paper, paint and colored paper, assembling diptychs and triptychs attached to large sheets of traditional
printmaking paper.
These works, created almost forty years ago, address issues of scale, abstraction, representation and the nature of the photographic object that have become especially urgent in both contemporary art and the vernacular uses of digital imagery.