Thursday, February 27, 2025 | 6:30 PM
Location: Residency Unlimited
360 Court Street, Brooklyn NY 11231 (map)
Live Trace is part of Shimomura’s series “The assumption 1 second = x cm”. In an overall reflection upon mass consumption of information in a digital age, this work also highlights Shimomura’s intricate relationship with calligraphy. Calligraphy reflects the historical practice of inscribing characters and expressing traces through writing, drawing, scratching, and carving.
This performance is a live tracing of the creative process of an artwork, based on the documentation of its completed piece. This tracing is carried out through Shimomura’s tracing of ink and three-dimensional elements, and sound tracing by Hara, attempting to unify the past and present into a single timeline.
In Live Trace, Shimomura work with ink on mixed media surfaces, while real-time footage of her actions is layered over a pre-recorded video to achieve a visual cohabitation of the different time axes – of the ever-progressing present and an ever-changing past – on a single screen. In doing so, the artist aims to reveal the impact of information on action by stripping away the traditional elements of calligraphy to their bare minimum, and focusing solely on the act of operating a line.
Ultimately, all information is controlled and influenced by one another. The timeline of past, present, and future cannot simply be represented as a linear sequence. We do not always see only one direction of time. The digitized information before our eyes embodies both – the time axes of the past and of the mutable future.
Click above to see images from the program
About
Nana Shimomura is an artist who deconstructs calligraphy by intertwining her work with contemporary media, and informing it through temporal and perceptual analysis. Thanks to a grant she received from the Pola Art Foundation she moved to Barcelona in 2022, followed by a residency in 2024 in New York with a grant from the Agency for Cultural Affairs Government of Japan. She has exhibited widely, including at Roppongi Art Night in Tokyo, Blanc Gallery in New York, and Hangar in Barcelona. She participated in “Today is Tàpies” organized by the Antoni Tàpies Foundation. Awards include the Gunma Biennale Encouragement Award. She was also an assistant at Tokyo University of the Arts. At the occasion of her residency at RU, on June 18, 2024 RU hosted the conversation Mark-making—Tracing its Cultural Roots, between Shimomura and Richard Vine.
Rui Hara is a musicologist focusing on Japanese and American 20th-century sonic arts from interdisciplinary, transcultural, and cross-genre perspectives. As a visiting scholar at CUNY, he is currently researching the activities of the Japanese composer/performer Takehisa Kosugi, who collaborated with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and many other experimental artists in the United States.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
