Yukari Umekawa's Itodenwa @ White Spec

Contained within the intimate environment that is White Spec, Yukari Umekawa's photographs hang,taking the viewer into their mood,requesting a moment to receive and adjust to their slowing hazy thought. In her statement, Umekawa expresses a desire to recreate the feelings and longings she has for home. The desire in the work is to evoke the sensations she is feeling,the drawn-out anxiety or emptiness that comes from questioning and adjusting to entirely foreign environments. The truth that makes stabilty realized as something only as concrete as ones own affirmations. The memories she has and sensation of being transplanted come through in these simple but powerful images.
They are moments we can all relate to. The use of the pinhole camera comes into play perfectly,in that they do render a sort of bleary signifance that is only realized in retrospect. We make memories when we are least aware that we are,and those mental images burn the strangest most insignificant moments into our lives from now until the end of time.
Soldifying herself and her confidence becomes something through the photographs. A natural questioning persists,belaboring and clouding a clarity that wishes to make firm her own reason. Each photograph individually is a blurry-edged dream. The frame containing them is as solid as the reality that she is living and existing where she now is. It is as if the swinging of her instability is transferred into the glances that she catches. Snap-shots are highly pigmented thoughts. The emptiness that is a pure thing,as much as it is a beautiful thing billows.Alone time comes to mind. The sensation one imagines or feels when experiencing something that we'd love to share,but know truly possesses a heightened appreciablity because of the isolation of it.
The captured glances are somehow appropriate in that they are often of telephone wires and telephone poles. The imagery that is obviously symbolic of the desire to communicate. The title of the show,Itodenwa, refers to what is usually thought of as a child's toy,a homemade device that helps reinforce a pure memory-driven feeling to the show. The photographs are individual moments trapped within their scale and reduced to a frozen image, a picture of her floating world.