* Today’s performance will be held in the garden (August 13, Saturday).
*Reservation is closed for both days. Same-day tickets is not available both days.
Instead of fixing images on paper, the photographer Hitoshi Toyoda works exclusively in the medium of the slide show. Toyoda manually operates analog slide projectors using photographic material taken from the past. The subtle shifts in emotions that lie between the images that appear, then disappear remind us of the preciousness of each moment of our lives. The Hara Museum has the pleasure of presenting two slide shows by Toyoda on two separate evenings, both in the museum’s courtyard garden.
The featured shows are spoonfulriver, a visual diary newly arranged by Toyoda, and his latest work for Nine Postcards, a unique slide photo and musical homage to the late Japanese environmental music guru Hiroshi Yoshimura, consisting of Yoshimura’s slide images and music.
August 13 (Saturday) 19：15 –
spoonfulriver 2007-2016 / 70min. / 35mm slide film / silent
“It begins with an ordinary street in New York City. As if writing a letter to someone I cannot forget.”
This is Toyoda’s fifth installment.
August 14 (Sunday) 19：15 –
for Nine Postcards 2015 / 40min. / 35mm slide film / sound
*Post-screening Talk: Tsutomu Mizusawa (Director, Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama) x Hitoshi Toyoda
The talk will be held in Japanese for about 30 minutes.
Drawing upon works from among the 2,800 slide photos left behind by the late Hiroshi Yoshimura, Toyoda created this latest work on commission by the Museum of Modern Art, Kanagawa & Hayama.
Place: The Hara Museum courtyard garden
*Or the Hall in the event of rain. Final determination will be posted on the Hara Museum website by 11:00 am on the day of the show.
Tickets: General 1,800 yen; students and Hara Museum members 1,600 yen each (ticket price includes admission).
*Two-show ticket: General 3,500 yen; students and Hara Museum members 3,000 yen *Reservation closed for Two-show ticket.
* Reservations can be made by e-mail (toyoda-ticket@haramuseum.or.jp) or at the reception counter at the Hara Museum.
* Requests for tickets will be accepted from 11:00 am, July 1, 2016.
* Ticket-holders may view the current exhibition It’s Our Permanent Collection! prior to the start of the slide show. Visitors may leave the museum and re-enter (on the same day only) by showing their ticket stub.
Hitoshi Toyoda Interview click here
Hitoshi Toyoda (b.1963)
Photographer. Born in New York and raised in Tokyo. Embarked on the self-study of photography after a trip to New York in 1986. Using New York as his base from 1993, he began exhibiting his visual diaries as live slide shows, manually operating analog slide projectors at public places that included parking lots on Broadway, parks in Chinatown, churches and theaters. From 2000 Toyoda began presenting his slide shows throughout Japan at museums, galleries and other art spaces, as well as abandoned elementary schools deep in the mountains and the prehistorical Sannai-Maruyama site in Aomori. He has presented his work at film and art festivals throughout the US and at the Yokohama Triennale in 2014. He has been based in Japan since 2012. http://www.hitoshitoyoda.com/
Hiroshi Yoshimura (1940-2003)
Sound artist. Born in Yokohama. Studied art at Waseda University. In addition to concrete poetry and graphic notation, Yoshimura left behind a body of work that included sound installations, performances using one-of-a-kind musical instruments and the design of sound environments at such public spaces as train stations, hotels and museums. His last work was a sound logo commissioned by the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama in 2003. Yoshimura visited the Hara Museum in 1980 and was inspired by the landscape to create music which was later played at the museum.
Resurrections and Correspondences
Hiroshi Yoshimura and Hitoshi Toyoda
It was a series of countless quiet little surprises.
Hitoshi Toyoda, throughout the entire summer of preparation, was immersed in the creation of that work.
for Nine Postcards
Last year on Sunday, October 25, 2015, Hitoshi Toyoda presented a new slide show as part of the events marking the closing of the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura six months hence. Like a carefully woven fabric, slides that Hiroshi Yoshimura (1940-2003) shot during a period of concentrated activity in the 1980s were selected and combined by Toyoda with music from Yoshimura’s album MUSIC FOR NINE POST CARDS to produce the new slide show that was screened in the courtyard of the museum.
The result was a spectacular work that reminded us once again of the fact that time and space is an amalgam which defies precise measurement. We of course carve numbers into it and use them as a guide for living, or we accumulate time-space, making it into something that we can share, even if temporarily. Otherwise, it would be impossible to lead a normal life or make even a single appointment.
If it is hyperbole to say that he breaks such rules, we might say Toyoda partially releases us from such distinctions, making everything ambiguous. Or more accurately, he reveals the world as a place rich with alternate perspectives. This is not to say everything assumes a fuzzy, indeterminate focus. Everything is extremely clear. Just like the mechanical sound “ga-chunk” made by Hitoshi Toyoda’s manual changing of the slides which feels like a steady division of time.
However, if one pays even a little attention, it should be clear that even this mechanical noise comes with an irregularity that is totally improvised. It is space-time run through with the breathing of humans in every nook and corner.
As Toyoda’s slide show unfolds in a steady and undramatic manner, resurrections and correspondences are triggered. Perhaps in connection with someone who has died. Or a thing or life that has become lost within a city long beyond conformity to human standards. Or a distant landscape of a street. Or a young girl.
Hiroshi Yoshimura poured everything that he had as a musician into his first album MUSIC FOR NINE POST CARDS. The concentrated force of the work was tremendous, but in its playing, the notes that comprised it were set free, unleashed as it were into space-time, where they continue to sound even now.
At the Hara Museum, where Yoshimura’s music was first played, this work will be resurrected, even if only for one night, and correspondences will be triggered.
When that happens, both reality and a second reality mediated by artistic expression may bleed into each other, melt into each other, become tangled and frayed, and suddenly, gently and almost certainly we will find ourselves taken to a place that we never knew.
Tsutomu Mizusawa
Director, The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama
TOYODA HITOSHI VISUAL DIARY / SLIDE SHOW
August 13 (Saturday) and 14 (Sunday), 2016
Organized by and held at Hara Museum of Contemporary Art
Cooperation provided by the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama
Technical support provided by Tetsuya Yamamoto（SHOUT）
Hara Museum of Contemporary Art
4-7-25 Kitashinagawa, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 140-0001
Tel: 03-3445-0651 E-mail: info@haramuseum.or.jp
Website: http://www.haramuseum.or.jp