Fleeting and Aftermath are two bodies of work celebrating the fragile and ephemeral experiences that leave profound and lasting emotional imprints.
Kioto Aoki is an artist and educator using the material specificity of the analogue image and image-making process to explore modes of perception as a politics of vision. Her photographic work oscillates between the still and the moving image, attentive to the apparatus of the human eye and the camera; while installation and artist book works engage mechanisms of structural tangibility and site-specificity. Forming a rhetoric of nuanced quietude, her practice considers the intimacies of vision through the experience of sight from inception through presentation.
About the Exhibition:
Lake Forest College is pleased to present a double exhibition of work by Chicago artist Sandra Binion, Fleeting and Aftermath, September 2—26, 2021, at the college’s Durand Art Institute.
Fleeting is a multi-media exhibition that includes video, photography, watercolor, sculpture, and sound installed with close attention to the Sonnenshein Gallery’s architecture, color and lighting. Fleeting is paired with Aftermath, a series of 30 watercolors presented in the adjoining Albright Gallery. The exhibition was in preparation in 2019-2020 and was originally scheduled for fall 2020, but was postponed one year due to the pandemic.
Three years in the making, Fleeting is an installation of artworks in dialogue that explore and celebrate experiences that are fragile and ephemeral, that inspire perseverance, and that leave lasting emotional imprints. Each artwork has its own individual background and resonance within this overall theme. For example, the two-channel video Blue Tarp frames a tattered tarp blowing in the wind whose delicate undulation is inseparable from its time-worn deterioration; the sculpture Root renders a hydrangea root unearthed from a family garden in bronze, a medium with a long history of memorialization; and the large-scale photographic diptych Woman on the Rue Chapon presents glimpses into the life of a woman living estranged but steadfast in a disarrayed Paris apartment. These and the other works in the exhibition are amplified by two vitrines placed just outside the galleries. Originally from the Field Museum, they are subtly returned to their didactic and natural history origins: one contains objects poetically tracing the artist’s influences and research for the exhibition, the other is completely filled with grasses from a regional prairie. The watercolor series Aftermath interweaves delicate mark-making and erasure in eccentric minimal compositions. Executed in 2016 during a residency in Tuscany, they accentuate an intense and intimate engagement with natural elements on the verge of decay and disappearance.
The exhibition is further extended with three musical events presented free to the public. Three women improvisers from Chicago will present solo concerts in the atrium of the Durand Art Institute that opens onto the galleries: vocalist Carol Genetti (September 11), taiko drummer Kioto Aoki (September 18), and cellist Katinka Kleijn (September 25). These performances will take full advantage of the wooden atrium’s warm and reverberant acoustics, which—like the exhibition— give material presence to an ephemeral experience.