Noritoshi Hirakawa: Subject

Salon 94 is pleased to present "Subject", new photographs by Noritoshi Hirakawa, in collaboration with architect Thom Mayne, from February 7 through March 4, 2005. Concurrently, on February 27 salon 94 will present a live dance performance, "In Search of a Purple Heart" by Noritoshi Hirakawa.

'Subject' is the first architectural photography project by Noritoshi Hirakawa, who is renown for his erotic and intimate images of young women and dancers. Here his models are staged within the University of Toronto’s Graduate House designed by Thom Mayne, in a contemporary "tableau vivant." He seeks to humanize the spare architecture by projecting his own eroticized and subversive stories within it. The architecture, in fact, is animated only through these stories and human situations.

The title, "Subject" refers to the people, interacting in the space. Traditionally, architectural photography is shown stand alone, either without people, or with anonymous people as "stick figures". Who do not interact with one another. Even fine art architectural photographers, for example Thomas Ruff, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Todd Eberle, follow this trajectory. Here, Hirakawa questions this tradition, as the architecture becomes another character in his story. The architecture is sexualized through the human interaction. Hirakawa has consistently asked the viewer to reach into his/her imagination while pointing at the boundaries imposed upon us by society. With "Subject", Hirakawa continues to question these cultural limits, as well as re-thinking architectural photography.

"In Search of a Purple Heart" is a provocative site-specific performance, written and directed by Noritoshi Hirakawa. Using Salon 94 as their stage, 3 dancers form a tangled interaction, expressing, consciously or not, the pains, losses and fears inherent in them, and us. "In Search of a Purple Heart" extends Hirakawa’s concerns with the collective unconscious and memories, the stigmas of pain and war, in the particular the Vietnam War.

Noritoshi Hirakawa lives and works in New York. He was born in 1960 in Fukuoka, Japan. His work has been exhibited in the New Museum and PS1, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum for Modern Art, Frankfurt; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Kunsthalle Vienna, Vienna; Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern and SMAK, Ghent.

Thom Mayne founded Morphosis in 1972 to develop an architectural firm that would eschew the normal boundaries of traditional forms and materials. The work of Morphosis ranges from Hypo bank in Vienna, to the Cedar’s Sinai Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles.

Subject
new photographs by Noritoshi Hirakawa, in collaboration with architect Thom Mayne