Sayaka Toda Solo Exhibition
“Across the Sea, or Beyond the Night”
■Venue
■Period
KANA KAWANISHI PHOTOGRAPHY
2-7-5-5F, Nishiazabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0031
Saturday, July 10th, 2021 - Saturday, August 21st, 2021
*extended until Saturday, August 28th, 2021 [temporarily closed on Friday, August 27th]
Wednesdays through Fridays 13:00-20:00 | Saturdays 12:00-19:00
(closed on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, and National Holidays)
*temporarily closed for summer vacation during August 11 (Wed) - 14 (Sat)
from the series “Across the Sea, or Beyond the Night” | 2021 | archival pigment print | ©︎ Sayaka Toda, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY
from the series “Across the Sea, or Beyond the Night” | 2021 | archival pigment print | ©︎ Sayaka Toda, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY
from the series Across the Sea, or Beyond the Night
2021 | archival pigment print | ©︎ Sayaka Toda, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY
KANA KAWANISHI PHOTOGRAPHY is pleased to present Sayaka Toda’s solo exhibition “Across the Sea, or Beyond the Night” from Saturday, July 10th, 2021.
Sayaka Toda was born in Saitama, Japan in 1988. In 2012, she completed her M.F.A. at Joshibi University of Art and Design, Graduate School of Art and Design, Fine Arts Course, Painting, and she has been attracting attention as a painter who connotes an implicit world of beauty and disfigurement, which are inextricably linked with each other. In her first exhibition at KANA KAWANISHI PHOTOGRAPHY, Toda will be showing photographs only, breaking new ground as an artist.
In her new work, Across the Sea, or Beyond the Night, Toda uses the motif of a rose as a starting point, which she has been daily photographing as a study. In the series, she also photographs a friend who now lives in Japan and tropical plants that bloom in the darkness of the night around Tokyo, uniting people and matters which have crossed the sea from different places and taken root in this island country into a single worldview.
Her works, which she calls “portraits of beauty with heterogeneity,” vividly capture both light and darkness, while encompassing Toda’s pursuit of the contradictory worldviews of beauty and disfigurement that are the essence of her work, drawing the viewer to the other side of the image.
We cordially invite all to this occasion where it will be Toda’s first exhibition at our gallery and the first solo exhibition that will showcase her photographic works only.
Across the Sea, or Beyond the Night
I travel around the suburbs of Tokyo in the middle of the night.
Using flashes and lights, I take snapshots of flowers and tropical plants that catch my eyes.
This is an act of collecting the elements that make up a painting one by one and visualizing the image.
The practice of photographing flowers is a drawing that triggers sensual thinking.
In the night, when all the contours dissolve, I shine a light on “roses,” “immigrants,” and “tropical plants.”
They have each taken root in this island country coming across the sea from different places.
And, I condense them into a moment.
The images are found in the boundary of the objects where their lines, forms, and mass are emphasized.
The work is expressed as a portrait of beauty with a self-sustainable heterogeneity in which the self does not intervene.
Sayaka Toda
Artist Profile
Sayaka Toda was born in 1988 in Saitama, Japan.
She completed her M.F.A. at Joshibi University of Art and Design, Graduate School of Art and Design, Fine Arts Course, Painting.
Her major solo exhibitions include “Where the beauty is” (2011, KINOSHO KIKAKU, Tokyo). Group exhibitions include “Sono Aida #COVID-19” (2020-, online exhibition), “Seeing the Unseen” (2016, Gallery Ohrin, Ibaraki, Japan), “Wonderful My Art” (2013, Kawaguchiko Museum of Art, Yamanashi, Japan), “TO THE FUTURE” (2012, Mizuma Action, Tokyo), and “The 31st Outstanding Rising Artists Exhibition in 2012 Presented by Sompo Japan Fine Art Foundation” (2012, Seiji Togo Memorial Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Museum of Art, Tokyo).
Major awards include “Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi 2010” Kazue Kobata Prize and “Shell Art Award” shortlist (2010).
>> 日本語PDF
>> English PDF