Ryoji Morimoto
“Traces in Flux”
Just as we connect the stars in the night sky to draw the figures of constellations, and then go on to weave stories from them, we humans may be inclined, whenever we look at something, to link images in our minds and imagine meanings or narratives. We try to see something beyond what is visible or already recognised or perhaps we feel a desire to question what we think we see and to draw new images from it. Morimoto’s new work Traces in Flux calls such impulses to mind.
Images of rivers, roads, living creatures, casual scenes from journeys and everyday life, are projected onto a large piece of fabric. The entire surface of this fabric is covered with embroidery: stitches crisscrossing freely in every direction. As the moving images overlap with the embroidered surface, they interfere with and blend into one another, producing a strange sensation in which the images in the viewer’s mind refuse to cohere, continually veering off course.
This experience, like a kind of visual play, forms the first surprise. The next surprise comes when the video ends and the projection equipment switches. Two projectors are installed on opposite sides of the fabric, and one and the same video is alternately projected from each.
When the direction of the light changes, the embroidered image that had been visible until then transforms. The stitches on the reverse side (though there is no real front or back) show through, and broken lines turn into continuous ones. A complex network of lines appears, resembling a maze, or a topographic map traced with contour lines, or the subway map of a vast metropolis.
Projected onto this intricate web of lines is the same video seen before, something already familiar, yet it becomes even harder to grasp what one is actually seeing. The sheer abundance of embroidered lines intensifies the difficulty of perceiving the image.
The images, we are told, are videos Morimoto has casually recorded on his smartphone in his daily life. What flows before us is a certain moment from his past, the time when he captured those images. Beneath that flowing imagery lies the time during which he embroidered the fabric. And overlapping both is the present moment, in which the viewer perceives the image through their own eyes and mind. Through the superimposition of these different past and present times, something like a new image seems about to take shape, yet it never fully does. We find ourselves continually enjoying this playful act of seeing.
In his other works, Morimoto has explored embroidery as a means of examining relationships between self and other, as well as concepts of place and time. In this piece, however, that act of confirmation may be something we, the viewers, are made to carry out ourselves, actively, through the very act of looking.
Moeka Nagao