The Future of Our Memories
Catalyst Contemporary presents The Future of Our Memories, a duo exhibition featuring the works of Ginevra Shay and Kei Ito whose practices examine the concepts of fiction, history, a multitude of realities, and the intimate reflection of identity through the use of analog photography.
Shay’s monochrome images, centered around gender, sexuality, family, and domesticity, are created by using black and white negatives in the color darkroom and manipulating colors individually through multiple layers of exposure. This performative process of selection, editing, and testing focuses on somatics and the temporality of identifying as non-binary. Using gestalt techniques in composition, Shay creates a gentle oscillation between what is forefront and what recedes with the presentation of self.
Ito’s vivid cameraless chromogenic prints originates from and ruminate on his grandfather’s experience of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during WWII. At the same time it also mediates on his own current status as an artist working in America. The works address a variety of related issues from the Manhattan Project and the subsequent downwinders, to black rain, radiation and cancer. Positioned in a limbo between his homeland with his familial history and a new home with opportunities in front of him, Ito brings to light and dissects the past to contemplate on the present.
The Future of Our Memories offers an interesting dichotomy in how these two artists construct imagined realities, identities and their corresponding themes. Shay’s work plays with fiction and reality while Ito’s looks back at a remembered reality and history and offers new interpretations of them. Through these narratives, Shay and Ito produce a synergistic relationship of visual language through how they work with narratives in the photographic media and expand upon them in order to impact the future.
