Exhibition: May 3-29, 2004
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 6, 6-9 p.m. View Works

NEW YORK – Globe Institute Gallery is pleased to announce “Vague Snapshots,” an exhibition of recent work by Japanese artist Yoichi Ota. On view will be seven oil-on-canvas paintings that suggest out-of-focus snapshots.

Executed in 2003 and 2004, Ota’s “Vague Snapshopts” represent cropped moments of everyday life. A street at night with two passersby’s backs, a golf player on the green, a “Motel 6” sign next to a palm tree seen from an interior, eleven seagulls in flight, two of which are dramatically cropped: these are the denotations and the “immediate” contents of Ota’s paintings.

This series transforms the “vernacular photograph” into what can relevantly be named as the “vernacular painting.” Ota’s enlargement of the snapshot and its transformation into a large-scale picture seem to bear witness to the “codes” of vision and visuality. As uncanny pictorial revelations of Lacan’s tuché and Barthes’s punctum, these works are evidences of the impossibility of vision to register a rectangular field of the outside world in full focus and clarity, whether that world is still or in motion, transfixed or temporal.

In an essay entitled “Photography and Abstraction,” Rosalind Krauss outlines the phenomenology encapsulated in Barthes’s punctum and Lacan’s tuché by stating:

If vision has a syntax of abstract relations, turning on conditions of wholeness, symmetry, continuity, edge, and painting can translate that syntax into a “language” of form, photography seems to be what resists language, being, as Roland Barthes put it, an example of the “nothing to say.” …Barthes also likens the photograph to what Jacques Lacan has called the tuché, that is, “the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real.” ...Lacan’s discussion of this encounter with the real comes from the section of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis called “Tuché and Automaton,” where “tuché” is used to signify “the real as encounter—the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter.”¹

As Ota translates a photograph into a painting, he incites a redefinition of the punctum and the tuché of the “vernacular painting.” He converts the snapshot of a motel into a “vague” Pandora’s box of connotations and that of critical theory.

Yoichi Ota received his B.F.A. from Hunter College of City University of New York in 2004, and is currently pursuing his M.F.A. at Hunter College. He has exhibited at The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, Hunter College, and About Glamour Gallery in Brooklyn.

For further information, please contact the curator, Raphy Sarkissian, at T 212.349.4330 ext. 110 or the artist at yoichiota8@hotmail.com.

¹Rosalind Krauss, “Photography and Abstraction,” in A Debate on Abstraction, a catalogue essay of a series of four exhibits held at The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, Hunter College, November 15, 1988 through June 2, 1989.