Noguchi Rika featured as an Artforum's "Critic's Pick"

Noguchi Rika is currently featured as a "Critic's Pick" on Artforum.com. Her exhibition, titled "The Sun" is currently on view at D'Amelio Terras, from May 2 through June 20, 2009.


Michael Paulson writes:

Walter Benjamin famously associated the rise of photography with the decline of spiritual authenticity in the work of art; however, for Benjamin, the earliest photographs retained a vital connection to spirituality, chiefly through their facilitation of the cult of remembrance. In her recent series “The Sun,” Noguchi Rika returns to one of the oldest and most basic of photographic technologies, the pinhole camera (an extension of the classical camera obscura), in an attempt to reinvest photography with a sense of metaphysical significance.

Each photograph in the series presents a direct or indirect view of the sun—captured through windows, down hallways, over buildings, and between clouds. The overexposure of the images, coupled with the soft focus of the pinhole camera, lends each picture a dreamlike, evanescent quality, which is heightened by the installation: The gallery space is darkened, and each photograph is lit by a single spotlight, creating a glare that produces the uncanny impression that one is actually staring into the sun, rather than its photographic equivalent. This dexterous manipulation of the viewer’s perceptual experience allows Noguchi to re-create something of the sensual, emotional, and epistemological shock that must have been experienced by photography’s earliest audiences. Meanwhile, the artist’s banal, almost touristic compositions evoke the snapshot of amateur photography, which has perpetuated the cult of remembrance through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. By deftly synthesizing the extreme familiarity and the essential otherworldliness of the photograph, Noguchi prompts reflection on the sense of mystery that continues to pervade our experience of photography in the digital era.

Link to external website