• Harumi Ori: I was Here





 
 
 

Harumi Ori: I was Here
QMA at Bulova Corporate Center

Ongoing

Public Reception with the Artists: Thursday, May 8, 3-5pm
Join us to celebrate Harumi Ori’s I Was Here and Ezra Shales’ new long-term installation of Measure Yourself.
In her sculptural take on a street corner bustling with usual signs of life, visual artist Harumi Ori offers a contemplative view on the permeability between man, traffic light, and the garbage can. Ori’s poetic elucidation of the physical world investigates urban ephemerality where the concrete and the abstract, like time and space, are often unrecognizable as distinctly one or the other.

Harumi Ori, I Was Here, 2003
Installation view

Ori processes her subjects between two- and three-dimensional objects beginning with by observing her “living” subject, capturing the scene and flattening it through photography. Ori then inflates this interpretation, building up volume and space through layers and folds of plastic that convincingly render human likenesses and provide spatial elements that preserve traditional perspective. While the far-ground is crowded with small figures, larger figures advance protrude from the wall into the viewer’s space off the wall. The rendering develops as a wall-relief, which in Ori’s new work I Was Here (2003), is made solely with industrial red plastic netting. Malleable and semi-translucent properties of the netting assert both quantifiable materiality and frail ethereality.

 

The familiar image of workers and visitors making their way through an urban complex—here, the West concourse of the Bulova Corporate Center—comes back to the viewer as deftly sculpted, vibrating figures that break from with the world as we know it. In I Was Here, Ori creates an aesthetic out of an existential inquiry of space that seems to trumpet the humble joy of everyday life.

 

Harumi Ori was born in Kyoto, Japan, and currently lives and works in New York City. She received a B.F.A. from the Women’s College of Fine Arts, Kanagawa, Japan (1991), and worked as a freelance illustrator and as a graphic designer at MIK Planning for three years. She received her B.F.A. with honors at School of Visual Arts, New York (2002) and is a recipient of the International Student Scholarship (2000), the Department of Fine Art Scholarship (2001), and the Alumni Scholarship Award (2001) from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been shown at Visual Arts Gallery, New York (2002) and will be in an upcoming exhibition at Bda, New York (2003).
 
 

Hours and Directions to Bulova Corporate Center

 

Press Contact: Carolyn Bane, (718) 592-9700, ext. 147, cbane@queensmuseum.org