Conversation with Naho Taruishi: When an Image Forgets

Artist Naro Taruishi shares her recent work on paper, When an Image Forgets, in a round-table discussion on the mechanical limitations of visual documentation and the individual capacity to reinterpret histories.

Sunday, February 26, 2017
6:00 – 8:00pm

Conversation with Naho Taruishi: When an Image Forgets

Artist Naho Taruishi shares her recent work on paper, When an Image Forgets, 2016 (currently on exhibit at Planthouse, NYC), in a discussion on the mechanical limitations of visual documentation, and the individual capacity to reinterpret histories. 

In Taruishi's drawing, which is derived from Robert Capa’s famous (and famously-debated) 1936 wartime photograph The Falling Soldier, taken during the Spanish Civil War, the rifle remains, the figure of the soldier is vanished and the field is expanded outside the camera frame, presenting us with an imagined landscape drawn beyond the limits of Capa’s image. 

When an Image Forgets questions the mechanical limitations of visual documentation – such as views contained by the camera frame or cropped out. While imagining a certain memory and familiarity with the original photograph, the work points to the individual capacity to reinterpret histories. In an age of data deluge, image overload, cognitive dissonance and contested truths, our history, memories and fictions are colliding at rapid pace.

When an Image Forgets is currently on view in a two-person exhibition at Planthouse Gallery (NYC) that presents the work of Naho Taruishi and Victoria Burge (through March 4). Both artists share an interest in mapping, technical images, and architecture through artworks emphasizing the contrast between the real, the imagined and the remembered. When an Image Forgets will be loaned from the exhibition for the conversation at 1@111. 

When an Image Forgets, 2016. Graphite on paper, 10 7/8 x 15 3/8 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

When an Image Forgets, 2016. 
Graphite on paper, 10 7/8 x 15 3/8 inches. 

Image courtesy of the artist.


Born in Tokyo, Naho Taruishi lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, Artists Space, Planthouse, A.I.R Gallery, White Box and Rochester Institute of Technology in NY, Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum in TX, and RK Projects in RI, among others. Her publication by Vincent FitzGerald & Co. is held in institutional collections including the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Harvard University and Lyrik Kabinett. Taruishi has been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She also has received fellowships from The Drawing Center, the MacDowell Colony, the Watermill Center, and Atlantic Center for the Arts.