ABOUT
ART FOR THOUGHT is pleased to present Isamu Sekido's photo exhibition, "Color Your Life with Vegetables and Fruits".
We hope you will enjoy the world of his new artworks that introduce vegetables and fruits, colored and arranged with his unique touch of fantasy.
ARTIST STATEMENT
If I see something that catches my eye, be it a pebble or a piece of wood, I take a picture of it first, and then either take it home and photograph it immediately or leave it for a while and take a picture of it when I feel like doing so one day.
The same goes for vegetables and fruits. If I want to take a picture, I take it first on the table. Then I set up the photo stand, put them there and look at them. Sometimes I take a picture right away, and sometimes I just watch it for a while.
I do some lighting, but I often take pictures using ambient light, so I leave it up to the sun and take a quick shot when I get a good feeling. The time it takes to take pictures is fleeting, but the models (vegetables and fruits) have to be patient. Foliage wilts, so I take pictures quickly. You can't take good pictures by thinking about it. Take a quick look and take a quick shot.
Some vegetables and fruits show life when they decay, and I sometimes take pictures of them. When I find trampled insects on the street, I bend down to photograph them as well.
Anyway, I take pictures of anything that catches my eye or catches my attention. Among these various things, for this exhibition, I have chosen vegetables and fruits that we would like you to see while they are still fresh.
CURATOR'S STATEMENT
When explaining his exhibition to me, Sekido said several times that he wanted to make the works "painterly. True to his words, the photographs avoid realistic tones and glossy prints, and instead use fantastical angles, colors, and textures of the printed paper to create "painterly" vegetables.
On the other hand, the vivid colors and bold composition of the photos are like looking at an Instagram post, and to me, living in the midst of social networking, they seem very "photographic. The actual vegetables, which ripen and shrivel after being picked, conversely become more vivid in the photograph after being captured.
Perhaps Sekido's works allow viewers to enjoy the back-and-forth between reality and artwork, between the painterly and the photographic.
Curator: Keiichiro Tao