In half awake, half asleep, Kaoru uses photography, video, and installation to contrast the inherent temporality in nature and the act of perceiving, with the static permanence suggested by her choice in materials. Images of natural ephemera barely escape recognition as near abstract compositions of fuzzy light, shadow, and leaves gild the glossy surfaces of photo paper. With subtlety and grace she suspends in time the fleeting moment of abstraction in that instant before recognition. More than a meditation on the act of seeing, Kaoru embraces the space where what has not yet been spoken may live, her work intensifies, silences and synthesizes the notion of awareness through photography. half awake, half asleep, explores the act of gazing, which exists in the ambiguous and fragile state between looking and seeing. Gaze is no longer seeing through eyes, but experiencing through seeing. Kaoru adeptly offers a non-visible plane of focus with her choice to make immaculate use of light in presenting a series of images where these visible components will never be in focus. Both in subject and materiality, half awake, half asleep pleasingly leaves more to the imagination.
Growing up in the rural countryside of Japan, Maki Kaoru spent her childhood investigating the natural environment around her, which nurtured her eventual decision to pursue fine arts. She earned her M.F.A. in Photography from Ohio University in 2005 and has been awarded grants and fellowships including residencies in Croatia, Italy, and Lancaster. Her work has been shown in galleries and institutions in New York, Los Angels, San Francisco, Boston, Portland, Denver and Baltimore.
Karou's exhibition has been curated by Joan Daggett, an oceanographer from New Haven, Conn., currently based in Fairbanks, Alaska.
The exhibit runs from 4 July - 17 July, 2009 in Victoria BC, Canada
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