JAPAN (IS A PLACE IN YOUR MIND)

Japan (Is a Place in Your Mind), 2018, 02:43 minutes, single channel video. Sound by Chris Martyn and Geoff Harvey. The appropriation of culture as an exotic signifies the ritual use of Cultural Identities as Exports. Through DIY images and approaches in the age of the Internet, the film invites viewers to consider questions about beauty, sentiment, and technology. This artistic research is planned to continue to Amakusa, Kumamoto, or Heaven Fields, and was developed after completing a maquette for Bound by Water book during Social Psychology study at Ehime University in Matsuyama-shi, Japan. Contact: mariammanart@icloud.com with inquiries, developments and to arrange for exhibitions and screenings. Special thanks to Atelier Nord. This video and those found on this website are in the Videokunstarkivet, in Oslo, Norway.

 

 

Matsuyama-shi, Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima | Japan (Selected images from Bound by Water)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BOUND BY WATER, 2013. The photographs in Bound By Water are medium-format film exposures exposures made from the Shikoku and Honshu islands and arranged in an interpretation of the constructed stories socially shared about Japan, proliferated through time, as memory.

 

During the Summer of 2013, Ehime University offered a study program with the College of Lake County in social psychology. A scholarship and personal fundraising realized this book containing photographs of ritual and historic sites, and the naturalized social and park spaces with medium-format film.

 

As an archipelago country, Japan is surrounded by what is considered in five-element traditions as a medium for change. To be bound by water, can be understood to be bound by change, or an idea of progress. The geographical position, relative to countries dominated by a Western world view, facilitates the perspective of Japan as an isolated area. The perception of isolation, or otherness, enacts an idealized stage for the idea of progress. Noted shifts in power, nuclear warfare and tsunamis become memorialized events creating memory of a perpetual pre/post-disater state, activating desires for change.

 

The social psychology and artistic research developed into Japan Is A Place In Your Mind, to further research Amakusa, Kumamoto, or Heaven Fields. Contact: mariammanart@icloud.com with inquiries, developments and to arrange for exhibitions and screenings.

Purchase the Bound By Water Book

Aline Smithson covered the publication on November 8, 2014 at Lenscratch.com

Order Limited Edition of 12: 8.5 x 11inch or Custom Prints: mariammanart@icloud.com