Minot - Gormezano

For over 25 years, Minot and Gormezano have been exploring gorges, mountain streams, cliff paths, lakeshores and plateaux, forging links between the roads of reality and the thoroughfares of the imagination. It has been a long, lonely walk where the vagaries of life have led them, stopping here and there to dream in places where photography and physical experience can reveal an enigmatic presence as transient as a shadow, a vibrant reflection at the heart of the world, setting in motion a silent, shimmering dance of substance and light. Premeditated or no, the images of this shared exploration remain unpredictable; they make up a unique body of work.







The photographers' acquaintance with philosopher Robert Misrahi has underlined the freedom of their approach: using images to reflect upon the dawn of existence, when the presence of the self is revealed in the world's eye.

Shoji Ueda

Shoji Ueda's name is often associated with meticulously staged pictures taken against a backdrop of sand dunes. He involved family members in these images, also appearing in them himself. The charm and originality of his compositions are more or less unique in the history of photography.

Ueda's work exists on the margins of documentary photography, informed by visual components garnered from within a small area in his native region of Tottori, a place which to all intents and purposes he never left. He perfected his staging technique, integrating all sorts of motifs into his work. Ueda's photography also reflects his curiosity and playfulness: his pictures are suffused with both poetry and humor.

Artist Statement

Many things inspire me to create: Personal experience, friends and family, travel, music, books, good food, old buildings, huge open fields and the ocean when it is enormous and in turmoil. I have always had a heightened awareness of the natural environment; the energy and rhythms which are ever present if you look hard enough. I make my prints, sculpture and video art from inspiration of this energy, and just as in the flow of nature, manage to breathe this life force into all my creations.

"You born with artistic eyes and hardworking hands." This is what my uncle always says to me when he sees my art. He is the only person doing art in my family before my generation. I think this sentence well described my way of doing art. Attempting to understand the complexity drives my artistic vision, I see the process of developing the concept and making art (both physically making the piece and mentally processing the idea)，the most important parts for me. I like to have a craft approach to my prints by using a mix of media; I like to approach printing techniques to my video art by using layers of colors and images. I also like to work with found objects. Through constructed structures, I let the symbolic and the imaginary perform a decisive role conveying new meanings to familiar objects and notion.

I often use the element of contrast in my work, finding and understanding the relationship between things, people and places, what happened years ago and what's happening now. My changeable personality is reflected in my art with a style that transforms and mutates with every pieces. The only constant is reinforcing this idea of emotion, the imagination within and beyond the nature, capturing sense of beauty that often accompanies each piece of art.