March 28 – May 23, 2015

Opening reception: Saturday, March 28, 6-8 pm

Artist Talk: 7 pm

Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce Satellite View, an exhibition of sculpture and video by Noriko Ambe. This is the artist’s third solo presentation at Lora Reynolds Gallery.

A paper sculpture by Noriko Ambe often looks like a three-dimensional topographical map, while another might look like a ream of paper gouged by a swarm of insects. Ambe creates these illusions by using a razor blade to cut similar but slightly different patterns into each consecutive sheet of paper in a stack. Stark white paper is her material of choice—unless she is cutting into catalogues of other artists’ work.

Ambe has long been interested in our relationship to nature, geology, and time. She explains:

    Time is essential to my work. I add more paper to a sculpture over time, and as a
    result, the work itself ends up embodying the time taken to create it. The process
    is as important as the finished product….the work looks like annual rings of a tree,
    a topographical map, or a wave, but it isn’t. It is absolutely the traces of the actions
    of a person—me.

This exhibition’s point of departure was a recent road trip Ambe took through the southwestern United States, traveling a route similar to the one Robert Frank followed while making the pictures that would become The Americans. While Frank was deeply affected by the people he saw on his travels, Ambe found herself especially drawn to the open, desert vistas and dramatic geological formations unique to the Southwest. One of the sculptures in Satellite View is reminiscent of the Grand Canyon, another of Chimney Rock, and one even incorporates projected photographs from Ambe’s travels.

Ambe knows that she is a witness of nature while at the same time a part of it—a tiny part of an inconceivably large whole. She acknowledges a similar relationship to the art historical landscape: producing her own work and contributing to the ever-expanding corpus of human creativity and achievement, while “collaborating” with other artists by cutting into their monographs. In this exhibition, Ambe slices into catalogues by Robert Frank and Gerhard Richter, a gesture of respect and spiritual unity.

This feeling of oneness—and her acceptance of the transience of all things—is the guiding force behind Ambe’s work. Like a Tibetan monk laying down a sand mandala grain by grain, Ambe wields her blade slowly, deliberately, daily—carving into each piece of paper, one at a time—in deference to the eternal march of time.

Noriko Ambe was born in Saitama, Japan in 1967. She has had solo exhibitions at the FLAG Art Foundation (New York) and Syracuse University Art Galleries (New York). She has participated in exhibitions at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Arizona), Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), and Weatherspoon Art Museum (North Carolina). In 2010 Ambe’s exhibition at Lora Reynolds Gallery took second place for Best Exhibition in a Commercial Gallery, as judged by the International Association of Art Critics. She was a finalist for the Nissan Art Award 2013. Some institutions that have her work in their collections include the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Yale University Art Gallery (Connecticut), and Urawa Art Museum (Japan). Ambe lives and works in New York City.