Mami Kosemura's Time-Lapse Still Lifes at Hara Museum

Mami Kosemura (Kanagawa, 1975) is the subject of her first solo museum exhibition, 'Phantasies Over Time,' at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, running until September 2, 2018. The show features around thirty works spanning painting, video, and photography, built around three technological processes: giclée printing, time-lapse, and stop motion. Kosemura's giclée prints on silk or canvas use inkjet printers at a quality level that depends entirely on the artist's skill, as seen in the series 'Guise'—seven photographs of an ikebana arrangement taken one month apart. Her time-lapse works involve manually retouching thousands of frames, often depicting fruit, flowers, and objects in the style of 17th-century European still lifes, such as 'Decaying' (2001) referencing Caravaggio and 'Sweet Scent' (2003) referencing Francisco de Zurbarán. However, Kosemura aims to sabotage these references, using animation to reveal the distance between painting and reality. In 'Drape off' (2015), a stop-motion video installation, she photographed objects for four seconds with small dramatic events later removed, using a super-high-speed 4K HD camera to achieve a perfectly symmetrical painted effect, resulting in a twelve-minute video with deliberately altered time and space. The Hara Museum, one of Japan's oldest contemporary art institutions, provides a fitting venue for Kosemura's elegant yet unsettling fusion of tradition and technology.