Nadia Hironaka

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	<title>Nadia Hironaka</title>
	<link>https://nadiahironaka.com</link>
	<description>Nadia Hironaka</description>
	<pubDate>Fri, 21 May 2021 19:22:46 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>NATIONAL</title>
				
		<link>https://nadiahironaka.com/NATIONAL</link>

		<pubDate>Fri, 21 May 2021 17:03:00 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Nadia Hironaka</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://nadiahironaka.com/NATIONAL</guid>

		<description>National — 

2002, digital video, 5:00 minutes

National is an homage to the National Products building, one of Philadelphia’s architectural landmarks. The building was left vacant for over a decade in the early 1990’s, and in 2002 Hironaka was invited to explore the interior for a work she created for the Fringe Arts Festival. National reanimates derelict offices and corridors, conjuring voices and images which once inhabited the structure. Imagined dramas play out within the space drawn from the buildings’ early twentieth century activity up to the early twenty-first century. Images of the building’s interior are combined with audio samples blurring the line separating fact and fiction, memory and history.


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		<title>A.R.S.</title>
				
		<link>https://nadiahironaka.com/A-R-S</link>

		<pubDate>Fri, 21 May 2021 19:22:46 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Nadia Hironaka</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://nadiahironaka.com/A-R-S</guid>

		<description>A.R.S. —
 

2006-2666
A.R.S. is a social outing group based in Philadelphia whose Asian American members enjoy sight-seeing, taking snapshots, videotaping, and picnics. The group’s focus is on museums, restaurants with quirky themes, very large sandwiches, street performers, historical attractions, people who dress up like Benjamin Franklin, tripe carts (only a few members like this), old forts, living statues, and other such cultural destinations. Inspired by President Al Gore, A.R.S. is currently presenting a multiple-media slide show to whoever will watch/listen.

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		<title>STRANGE STORIES FROM A CHINESE STUDIO</title>
				
		<link>https://nadiahironaka.com/STRANGE-STORIES-FROM-A-CHINESE-STUDIO</link>

		<pubDate>Fri, 21 May 2021 18:04:42 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Nadia Hironaka</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://nadiahironaka.com/STRANGE-STORIES-FROM-A-CHINESE-STUDIO</guid>

		<description>Strange Stories From a Chinese Studio&#38;nbsp;— 

2009, rear-screen video installation, digital video, 6:00 minutes


Hironaka video graces Asian Arts and passersby

There’s a fabulous piece of public art–a video projected on
a window on Vine Street–good enough to make you slow down your car and forget
to drive it.


Nadia Hironaka’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, is
visible only after dark, on the window of the Asian Arts
Initiative, 1219 Vine Street. It is part of Asian Arts’ second Chinatown
In/flux exhibition, this one subtitled Future Landscapes. This outing, there
are four (or six, depending on who’s counting–two of them are matched pairs of
a sort) public art projects scattered around the Chinatown neighborhood.


Hironaka’s piece celebrates the Asian presence in America
and the cross-fertilization of the two cultures–American Pop billboard meets
spare Asian crockery decoration. The video is like watching 1000 clowns emerge
from a VW bug. A giant hand uses chopsticks to pick Asian cultural icons out of
a Chinese food take-out container while Western cultural icons rain down from
off camera (at least that’s where I came in on the video loop). The symbolic
cultural exchange ranges from Heinz ketchup bottles to mah jongg tiles, and the
logic magically shifts so what rains down or emerges from the box can be Asian
or American. Off to the side, a group of ambiguous, silhouetted figures group,
ungroup, regroup–people too flat to reveal their ethnic identities (unless you
happen to know who’s who).


The image is luminous, beautiful and endlessly pleasing and
engaging. It can deliver a quick hit for people driving by yet a slow unfolding
of ideas for anyone who slows down to watch.By Libby Rosof, The Art Blog, April 10, 2009


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		<title>MENISCUS</title>
				
		<link>https://nadiahironaka.com/MENISCUS</link>

		<pubDate>Fri, 21 May 2021 18:02:31 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Nadia Hironaka</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://nadiahironaka.com/MENISCUS</guid>

		<description>Meniscus — 

2000, digital video and 16mm film, 3:00 minutes

Tensions arise between formal and conceptual issues surfacing as a Meniscus. A 1960’s stag film stimulates thoughts on pornography, sex, and love. Layers of the films’ emulsion are scraped off creating vacant spaces and outlines. The films’ original subject matter becomes blurred as candy-coated digitally animated shapes float throughout the piece. These shapes and voided spaces mask the scene like translucent veils, with only glimpses into the layers behind.


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		<title>A GIRL NAMED PRISM</title>
				
		<link>https://nadiahironaka.com/A-GIRL-NAMED-PRISM</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 26 Apr 2021 18:24:23 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Nadia Hironaka</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://nadiahironaka.com/A-GIRL-NAMED-PRISM</guid>

		<description>A Girl Named Prism — 

2004, multi-channel video installation with surround-sound audio, 16:00 minutes

Presented as a synchronized multi-channel video installation, a girl named Prism presents a fractured fictional narrative that focuses on the life of a middle aged woman as she attempts to harmonize her past, present, and future identities. Three screens simultaneously play out various accounts of the heroine’s personas: red/present, green/future, and blue/past. 
In addition to the multiple screen set-up, the installation uses surround-sound to envelope the viewer. Specific sounds from each story are strategically positioned within the space. Focus shifts from one channel to the next by the movement and emphasis of corresponding audio tracks. 
Prism’s visual time-warp encompasses the viewer’s physical space. The multi-channel installation allows for the viewer to actively choose which image or story to focus upon. This continuous shifting of gaze highlights the non-linear struggles within the characters’ existence. Each account communicates about the fragmentation of a woman’s life over time: her love, her work and her home.


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		<title>THE LATE SHOW</title>
				
		<link>https://nadiahironaka.com/THE-LATE-SHOW</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 26 Apr 2021 18:24:22 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Nadia Hironaka</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://nadiahironaka.com/THE-LATE-SHOW</guid>

		<description>The Late Show&#38;nbsp;— 

2006, multi-channel video installation with surround sound audio

In her multi-channel video installation, The Late Show, Nadia Hironaka expands the cinematic experience into the realm of the gallery environment. Synthesizing video projection, videos on monitors, and audio, Hironaka entices the viewer to imagine characters leaving the confines of the projected image and entering the real space of the gallery. Using an abandoned drive-in movie theater as her point of departure to examine the convergence of cinematic and real space, Hironaka also asks us to reflect on how mood and emotion are constructed within the context of film.

The first projection is of an empty drive-in theater (which is actually composed of three channels, or three projected videos). Working with the projectionist of the Garden Drive-In, located near Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, Hironaka recorded a wide-angle view of the theater while a film projector projected light (no image) on to the large outdoor movie screen. Hironaka digitally created a flying moth that is superimposed on the illuminated screen; her artificial moth accompanies several other insects that appeared in the light on the evening of the shoot. A lone automobile idles near the front row, closest to the screen.

Across the gallery, another video projection tells a fragmented story of a woman driving a car and following a comet through the night sky. Her journey takes her to the abandoned drive-in, where she parks. Leaving the car, she flicks her cigarette on the ground, she exits the video, where she remains off screen, her car, headlights on, now the only remaining image. A video monitor on the floor of the gallery captures a vignette of a cigarette smoldering on the ground. The viewer hears the woman’s footsteps and recognizes her presence, although she is no where to be seen. The sound of breaking twigs is accompanied by the ambient chirping of crickets and hooting of owls. Here, Hironaka goes outside the projected image to convey narrative by employing sound and video images on separate monitors. Adjacent to the video projection on the same wall, a small television monitor pears through an opening. On the monitor, a video documents a lens in the process of being focused by a film projectionist and then the projector lens itself in the midst of its illuminated throw, the simulated projector lens is in effect projecting the image of the drive-in movie scene located across the room. Hironaka’s representation of the burning cigarette and projector lens on small monitors shares some kinship with trompe l’ oiel painting, whereby a painted image of an object tricks the viewer into thinking s/he is seeing the real thing.


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		<title>VANITAS</title>
				
		<link>https://nadiahironaka.com/VANITAS</link>

		<pubDate>Thu, 20 May 2021 01:50:38 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Nadia Hironaka</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://nadiahironaka.com/VANITAS</guid>

		<description>Vanitas&#38;nbsp;— 

2005, single-channel video with stereo audio, 3:00 minutes
A long hazy summer spent amongst friends, captured (or just stuck) outside the folds of time.&#38;nbsp;


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		<title>HOME</title>
				
		<link>https://nadiahironaka.com/HOME</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 26 Apr 2021 18:24:23 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Nadia Hironaka</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://nadiahironaka.com/HOME</guid>

		<description>HOME — 

2004, single-channel video with surround-sound audio, 9:55 minutes

Home explores the physical, mental, and cinematic spaces connected with the domestic environment. A loss of present grounding unfolds both spatially and temporally as images speed up and break free from the confines of the structured frame. In Home the intimate spatial surroundings of the home environment ultimately lead to disorientation and panic.


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		<title>MY STARS</title>
				
		<link>https://nadiahironaka.com/MY-STARS</link>

		<pubDate>Thu, 20 May 2021 02:46:55 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Nadia Hironaka</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://nadiahironaka.com/MY-STARS</guid>

		<description>My Stars&#38;nbsp;— 

2003, two-channel video installation, wall mural, mirrored kaleidoscopes, 5:30 minutes (excerpt 1:30 minutes)

-from curator Cassandra Coblentz’ catalog essay for SurfaceTension,
an exhibition at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, 2003


Her newly redesigned installation brings together two video works National and International that explore/mine two vacant architectural spaces. Absent any human protagonists, the monumental buildings are the unlikely stars of Hironaka’s videos.

The first video, subtitled National, documents the interior of Philadelphia’s landmark Modernist National Product’s building. Now deserted, Hironaka’s camera traverses its corridors, uncovering vacant offices that the artist has constructed to appear as if its inhabitants fled suddenly leaving behind open drawers and cabinets, boxes packed with paper work, and once fashionable modernist furniture. From one space to the next the camera fixes on bizarre and seemingly forgotten and slightly ominous scenes: a restroom trash bin overflowing with paper towels; a pile of brightly colored futon mattresses. The second video, subtitled International, was filmed inside the equally monumental Fabrica building designed by Tadao Andono, situated outside Treviso in Northern Italy. Though far from derelict, this building is no less vacant than its Philadelphia counterpart, inhabited only by anonymous caretakers who maintain its polished finish. Hironaka’s camera follows the building’s contours, tracing the vertical plains of white walls and the repeating rectangles of a slightly spiraling staircase. Probing the space as if searching for some lingering trace of human presence, the lens gleans only subtle shadows and patterns of light filtered through the building’s geometric architectural forms.

The installation embeds these video works within a tableau that consists of a wall painting, two star-shaped incisions in the surface of the gallery wall and two star-shaped mirrored kaleidoscopic structures that form a bridge between the surface of the gallery wall and two monitors that present the videos recessed within the wall. The star-shaped cuts are situated among other silver painted stars in the design of the wall painting. As if depicting the horizontal movement of shooting stars, brightly colored bands extend from not only the painted stars but also from the cut out stars and the moving imagery of the kaleidoscopic screen. From inside the gallery wall, the mirrored planes of the kaleidoscope infinitely morph the geometric forms and colors depicted in the videos. These forms and colors seem to spill out onto the surface of the gallery wall in such a way that architectural space becomes a no less malleable formal element than digital video. The wall painting even further emphasizes the shifts between planes of surface and depth, because it establishes a flat static surface that provides a contrast to the dynamic active moving imagery within the wall.

The distorting lens of the kaleidoscopes results in a visual experience of endlessly unfolding spaces. Reflected and refracted off the mirrored plains, surfaces/shapes seem to constantly un/fold into depth, and any notion of a “point of view” as constructed by the camera is fractured beyond recognition. One might say that Hironaka fractures the “screen-as-eye” to reveal the underlying heterogeneity of the moving image, a phenomenon, as Deleuze describes it, is “made up of breaks and disproportions, deprived of all centers, addressing itself as such to viewers who are no longer the center of their own perception.”

For Deleuze, the camera is not an instrument that is continuous with the human eye: it is, rather, an artificial mode of perception that transcends the limits of ordinary seeing. By contrast, it is the screen that functions as a surrogate eye, processing the plurality of visual data as image. “The eye isn’t the camera,” Deleuze writes, “it’s the screen. As for the camera, with all its propositional functions it’s a sort of third eye, the minds eye.” As Hironaka’s camera navigates these deserted spaces in real-time, it is constantly interrupted by rapidly edited sequences—flash-backs or visual memories of preceding rooms and architectural forms—flashes of what Deleuze calls the mind’s eye.

Hironaka uses audio and visual editing techniques not only to further the play of surface and depth, but also to reference memory and cinematic history. In both video works, Hironaka repeats and remixes sound bytes from historic Hollywood films to trope the cinematic convention of setting a tone through a soundtrack. Sounds, some gleaned from 60′s sci-fi films, such as: footsteps, clicks, white noise, and other abstract mechanical sounds, provide an aural echo of Hironka’s video editing. This coordinated sense of visual and aural rhythm establishes a keen sense of texture that contributes significantly to the overall tone of the work. In the realm of the visual, Hironaka’s explicit use of digital editing further emphasizes a very conscious construction of framing, often taking advantage of digital editing technology to frame one shot inside of another, or position two images of architectural spaces side by side within one framed shot. In a sense the entire work is a constantly repeating process of framing and reframing.


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		<title>THE GROUNDSKEEPERS</title>
				
		<link>https://nadiahironaka.com/THE-GROUNDSKEEPERS</link>

		<pubDate>Thu, 20 May 2021 02:21:44 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Nadia Hironaka</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://nadiahironaka.com/THE-GROUNDSKEEPERS</guid>

		<description>The Groundskeepers&#38;nbsp;— 

2001, digital video, 5:30 minutes

The ship has landed! So begins the investigative movement through unfamiliar space. The Groundskeepers is visualized, with surveillance eyes, as a tour through a lone, desolate building and it’s surrounding grounds. While exploring these spaces the presence of human absence becomes apparent. Feelings of detachment begin to incite a sense of voyeurism. This vacant realm outside of oneself allows for the imaginative inventions of playful narratives and personas.&#38;nbsp;


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