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Manyo Wandering in the USA
Junko Ishiro approaches painting with iconoclastic zeal. Her seemingly straightforward oil paintings are at once a document of what is and is not present in the landscape. To emphasize this point she has staged a number of performances whereby she sets fire to the painting in the very spot it was painted in the natural or urban landscape. Through this act of destruction Junko Ishiro creates a unique, four–sided dialogue between artist,
subject, object and viewer.
The Man’yoshu, or Collection of Myriad Leaves* is the first major anthology of early Japanese poetry. In her effort to connect most efficiently with an American audience, Junko Ishiro turned to an English translation of this Japanese classic text as an inspiration. In this ancient volume, men, women, and children all contributed verse. The poets included in this anthology speak of their affinity for nature, their country, and the unique cultural traditions of Japan. The artist has selected particular Low Country landscapes that approximate specific poems from this anthology.
Ishiro’s paintings attempt to make visible that which is invisible. To her, a landscape is not synonymous with Nature. Trees, mountains, and sky are merely visible components of much larger systems. Nature has the capacity to harm us, whereas a landscape is something we view within the frame of human vision. Ishiro believes that the only way that we can begin to see the invisible threads of nature is if we perform an action that disrupts the natural flow. By burning her paintings in the landscape, she is inserting herself, and her will, into the very fabric of the thing she wishes to understand. Then, in pairing her works with poetry in an interactive installation involving video projection, animation, and two-way mirrors, the disruptions become confounding.
Early in her career as an artist, Junko Ishiro considered herself to be a landscape painter. Even then, she was more interested in understanding her place within nature than in depicting a realistic landscape. Using a more philosophical approach to the interpretation of landscape, Ishiro seeks to explore the unseen relationships that exist between humans and nature. By enacting an almost ritualistic intervention, the artist inhabits the role of shaman. In this way, she is creating a space for viewers of her art to contemplate the ineffable.
The title Manyo Wandering in the USA offers a glimpse into the artist’s sly sense of humor, by implying that she is a wandering 8th Century Japanese poet let loose on the contemporary American landscape.
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