emergence

aaploit presents emergence, a solo exhibition by Oishi Izumi, on view from April 14 through May 14, 2023.

Oishi Izumi studied Western painting at Kyoto Seika University. Since her time as a student, she has been highly regarded for her practice of painting onto photographic supports.

The photographs Oishi uses range from personal snapshots to anonymous images and representations drawn from world news. She takes a small photograph that has caught her eye and enlarges it—expanding it to a scale at which it can no longer be recognized as an image. Using this near-unrecognizable field of dots as a support, she zooms into the subject and layers paint, beeswax, and gofun (shell white). The resulting surface appears at first glance to be an abstract painting, seeming to conceal the facts captured in the photograph—yet Oishi says she is, rather, emphasizing them.

Immersing herself in the situation the photograph captured, she gathers the particle-like image together, and each layer applied to the surface that emerges functions as a magnifying glass. From Oishi's work, messages seem to appear that exceed the representation the original photograph held.

emergence 1997.9.26, produced for this exhibition, uses a personal photograph as its support. A small photograph, enlarged to 200 cm in height and 100 cm in width, its image reduced to particles—she traces these particles to compose the picture plane. The layers Oishi builds seem to draw up time and place one by one, blurring some elements and intensifying others. Even events from distant lands come to feel like one's own. Painting onto photographs, she says, is not concealing but magnifying.

This exhibition presents works including two large-scale new pieces using world news imagery and the artist's own roots as supports.

For inquiries regarding the exhibition and works, please contact info@aaploit.com.