Komatsu Hiroko: Second Decade
Joseloff Gallery at Hartford Art School, University of Hartford • West Hartford, CT • hartford.edu • Through December 10, 2022
A single photograph is not enough to make sense. A single word doesn’t make sense by itself, either. And when you put together multiple photographs or words, a meaning emerges.
—Komatsu Hiroko
In 2010 Japanese artist Komatsu Hiroko rented a defunct real estate office in Tokyo, challenging herself to mount one solo exhibition of her own photographs each month. Coming to photography in mid-life, her premise in this rapid-fire production and subsequent display was to approximate ten years of exhibition experience in one year. In the context of conceptual art practices, of which Komatsu—who became a photographer after a career in experimental music—likely was aware, the framework of creating a structure within which to improvise a series of actions can be characterized as a work of art in itself. Analog black-and-white photography became her primary material in this enterprise.
Soon, the small office’s spatial limitations catalyzed Komatsu to break from modernist museum exhibition conventions where individual framed works are usually hung evenly spaced and at eye level. To optimize the space, she began installing the photos en mass, covering the walls and eventually, using the floor. While invented out of necessity, these enveloping installations—some of which have involved thousands of photographs—also reflect her influences, including the looping, sometimes improvisational nature of experimental music and the seriality, phenomenology, and site specificity associated with conceptual and minimalist art practices.
Since 2020, Komatsu has largely focused her Leica camera on industrial sites around Tokyo, taking numerous photographs at each location but never visiting any location more than once. These pandemic-era photographs comprise the immersive, site-specific installation commissioned for Komatsu Hiroko: Second Decade, her first large-scale exhibition in the United States. Curated by Dr. Carrie Cushman, the Edith Dale Monson Director and Curator of the Galleries at Hartford Art School, Second Decade also includes handmade artist books, a selection of photograms, and Silent Sound (2021)—a three-channel, cinematic installation that Komatsu describes as “a film about music without sound,” which features silent footage of performances by the Tokyo electronic band 3RENSA continuously looping through three 8mm projectors.
For Komatsu, the industrial districts and unfinished construction sites she photographs share a connection with the workings of capitalism as they “sustain the base of capitalist economy.” In the city of Tokyo—where construction projects for the Olympics were halted due to COVID-19 and the average lifespan of a building is a mere 20 years—she is also attuned to urban development’s detritus and contemporary architecture’s propensity for planned obsolescence. Komatsu described the appeal of these industrial sites in a 2022 Aperture magazine interview with Pauline Vermare, “I enjoyed taking photographs of those empty construction sites, which gave me an impression of shiny ruins. When people look at those pictures, they can’t tell whether the scenery shows the process of building or of demolishing something,” adding that these locales also expose Japanese class hierarchies. “Those who work in these sites are so-called blue workers, and I believe those sites are where you can see the people who make up the lower part of our society and our infrastructure most clearly.”
In her installations, individual photos are fashioned into a multisensory experience that transforms the gallery into what scholar Franz Prichard describes as a “positive feedback loop” of imagery. In his 2022 Trans Asia Photography article on Komatsu titled “The Feedback and Noise of Hiroko Komatsu’s Photographic Materialities,” Prichard unpacks connections between experimental music and Komatsu’s photography, writing, “photographically, rather than sonically, [Komatsu’s work] renders a noisy yet generative form of feedback that saturates the human body’s sensorial capacities through the installation’s specific assemblage of material processes.” He goes on to describe her installations as having a sense of “overload”; this includes the overload in each individual photo—Komatsu has stated that, regardless of the industrial site’s size, she intentionally frames them to “look crammed”—and the overload that comes with Komatsu’s profusive harnessing of photography’s seriality/reproducibility and her recycling of elements from past installations.
For most, today’s visual overload is born from an unrelenting attention economy that algorithmically distributes digital images to a myriad of screens. Komatsu’s photo-based installations, however, encourage an embodied relationship to the medium of photography, creating ambient environments that spark exploration and curiosity. Rather than bombarding the viewer with images in order to distract and entertain, she uses photography’s seriality to reveal, seeing her photographic practice as one “where things are exposed, where the power of construction and the power of destruction are visible.”
—Terri C Smith