Themed around the connection and relationship of the human individual with imagery reflecting sceneries and the flood of information that surrounds us in daily life, Ishii’s artistic practice can be understood as creating imagery by way of his body, for which he translates physically perceived existing images back into images in the form of paintings.
According to Ishii’s idea, imagery originally belonged to the non-human realm. The emergence of film and photography must have been an impactful step for imagery as something different and independent from man, but it immediately came to be processed as raw material, and incorporated into the mills of society as artificial reproductions. In Ishii’s view, the computerization and industrialization of imagery that initially used to be mere replicas brought along significant changes also in modern society. These transformations revolving around imagery were certainly one major factor that caused the superficialness that is characteristic of modern society. One can say that our sensibility regarding aspects of reality and substantiality, such as distinguishing between reality and fiction, is closely related to the penetration of imagery into society.
In today’s society that is infiltrated by imagery, the border area between subject and object has taken on multiple dimensions, as humans are constantly surrounded by superficial images. This is where Ishii, who previously focused on the human body and pluralized imagery in ”Subimage,” introduces a new material dimension.
Through the direct interposition of surfaces of ”rocks” on the boundaries of mirrors and monitors as interfaces between subject and object, Ishii aims to generate fissures in planar surfaces. It is through the “holes” that penetrate images and boundaries in multiple media, that the ”base media of imagery” as the very foundations of images are exposed, and that is where the original state of imagery that we perceive but have become unable to recognize in daily life, and the non-human ”world of Schein” supposedly appears. Ishii believes that, by trying to access that ”world of Schein,” people will be able to sense that stage that precedes the “mirror stage” in a psychoanalytical sense, that state of ”jouissance” in which boundaries between the self and the other do not exist.
Through the “holes” in this superficial world that we are constantly interacting with today, be it sceneries or information, you can take a peek at the ”plane of jouissance.”
Plane of Jouissance press release. 2011 (My Hole: Art in Hole)
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