Toriyama Akira (鳥山晃) Art & Photo Exhibition at Gallery Kobo (巷房) - (2010/01)

Toriyama Akira has (until January 30th) an interesting three-part exhibition utilizing all three exhibition spaces of Gallery Kobo (巷房) (in the Okuno Building in Ginza), entitled "Tatsu-Hikari / たつ光".  In the small under-the-stairs space is a kind of... of... I don't know if sculpture is the right word, but something similar to that with physical shapes, light & shadows, which was my favorite part of the exhibit.  Moving over to the basement regular exhibition room, there are very large photographs that got me to thinking "Hey!  You can print out photos this huge?  I want to do that too!"  The promotional postcard for the event is as follows:

The above image being on a postcard, it's hard to image the effect of the huge prints (covering most of each wall they are on), but the effect is pretty much like being at the scene the pictures were taken.

Most effective were the scenes of things at a distance, which seemed quite real from any viewing distance.  Photos of closer things needed to be seen from a distance to look right however.  As an example, there was a scene of motion-blurred moving water in the basement space that was disturbing to look at up close, but began to look natural when seen from the extreme opposite side of the room.  Probably the disturbing feeling when seeing it up close would be different with everything in focus, but with the blur, distance is needed for it to look right.

I hope I'm not sounding overly critical though, because the huge photos were actually quite nice to look at and some had emotion-generating levels of beautiful color in them.

Toriyama Akira's website is here:
http://www009.upp.so-net.ne.jp/mimoro/index.html

Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
http://youtube.com/lylehsaxon