“Kunié Sugiura: Dark Matters/Light Affairs”opens June 30, 2000 at Vassar’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

"Kunié Sugiura: Dark Matters/Light Affairs" features a selection of some 30 major works produced in the past twelve years by New York artist Kunié Sugiura. The show opens Friday, June 30, 2000 at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College and runs through Sunday, September 17, 2000.

Sugiura, a subject of many one-artist shows and a featured participant in "New Photography 13" (1997) at the Museum of Modern Art, will speak in Taylor 203 on Friday, September 15, 2000 at 6 p.m.

Sugiura's chosen medium is the photogram, a cameraless photograph made by placing objects (often, in Sugiura's work, living beings) in front of photographic paper and exposing them to light. Sugiura's images - the preserved shadows of flowers, creatures of land and sea, and even boxers frozen in battle - resonate with a sense of immediacy and living discovery like that which animates the works of the earliest photographers. At the same time, she is the contemporary avatar of a long Japanese visual tradition grounded in the economical, haunting beauty of the silhouette.

Skeins of swirling photographic chemicals, intentionally fixed at the printing stage, suspend Sugiura's subjects in the otherworldly present-tense of the darkroom. Her lush positive and negative renderings prompt reconsideration of her elemental medium as a vehicle of illusionism, as an exquisite dialect of design, and as the self-portrait of a natural world acting out timeless private dramas.

"Kunié Sugiura" is organized by Pamela Auchincloss Arts Management Services and presented with funding from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation. This traveling exhibition, making its debut at Vassar, is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication, distributed by the University of Washington Press and featuring essays by Bill Arning of the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Joel Smith of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m. Admission is free and the Art Center is wheelchair accessible. For additional information, call the Art Center at 845-437-5632 or visit http://fllac.vassar.edu//

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations or information on accessibility should contact Campus Activities Office at (845) 437-5370. Without sufficient notice, appropriate space and/or assistance may not be available.

Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

This article was posted on Friday, June 30th, 2000.