Komatsu Hiroko: Creative Destruction

Curated by Carrie Cushman, the Linda Wyatt Gruber ‘66 Curatorial Fellow in Photography

Davis Museum at Wellesley College, September 17-December 13, 2020

The award-winning photographer Komatsu Hiroko designed her latest installation, Self-Slowing Error, specifically for the Davis Museum’s Levine Gallery. Komatsu uses 8x10 prints, large rolls of uncut photographic paper, and videos filmed during previous exhibitions to coat the gallery in monochrome, generating a uniquely embodied experience of photography. This material overload acts as a proxy for Komatsu’s photographic subject matter—industrial building and scrap materials that await transfer to sites of new construction, or the dump. In the wake of massive redevelopment projects in her home city of Tokyo, the host of the Summer Olympic Games in 2021, this installation reflects on the logic of capitalism. Unveiling the environmental chaos and excessive waste that undergirds urban renewal, Komatsu’s work creates a space to consider the cycles of creation and destruction that define the twenty-first century city. Accompanied by a bilingual online exhibition catalogue, this is the artist’s first exhibition in North America, and the first solo exhibition at the Davis Museum devoted to an artist from Japan.