ROOM 22　RIKO KINOSHITA

Riko Kinoshita was born in Tokyo in 1994. She graduated from the Department of Painting at Musashino Art University’s College of Art and Design in 2017, and completed a Master’s Degree Program at the university’s Graduate School of Art and Design in 2019. Her recent solo exhibitions include Nocturnal Lights and Stars Afar (Court Gallery, Tokyo, 2015), Play and Catching Stars (Art Space 88, Tokyo, 2018),  NEW SCALE (Kodenma Jinen Gallery, Tokyo, 2019), and At the Bottom of Atmosphere (Kodama Gallery, Tokyo, 2019). She was a finalist at the 2019 Contemporary Art Foundation Awards.

Kinoshita calls her works “drawings” regardless of whether they are executed in two or three dimensions, and perceives her creative process as “manifesting images received from the world” and “an unpredictable, playful act”.
The three works presented in this room are all executed in cyanotype on paper. Kinoshita’s process involves exposing the prepared surface to sunlight while shading parts of it with objects such as thin paper, wire, nets, and paper clay. This creates gracefully curving lines and patterns with gentle gradients reminiscent of traditional aizome (indigo-dyed) textiles.
In her curtain series, images of curtains and nearby floating dust particles have clear, burned-in outlines of other objects superimposed over them.The different shades of blue across the surface as a whole evoke the presence of outdoor light.To Kinoshita, curtains are an apparatus that projects the reality that exists beyond, making distant natural features and events feel closer. These works recapture this idea in cyanotype, inviting the viewer to examine the things we tend to overlook in everyday life, and perhaps even directing the viewer’s awareness to their psychological distance from such things.
In grit and dust #1, projections of floating dust and lines like handwriting trace Kinoshita’s trajectory as she seeks to use methods on a human scale to measure and perceive a world pregnant with permanent anxiety due to unpredictable disasters both natural and human.