Menhirs,
standing stones, stone circles, these markers from human lives lived
thousands of years ago still retain their strength
in the human imagination. Safe-T-Gallery is honored to be exhibiting
a series of stunning, large-sized photogravures of these enigmatic
megaliths, by printmaker and photographer Barbara Yoshida.
The exhibit will
run from Jan 19th through February 25th with a reception for the artist
on Jan 19th, from 6 to 8 PM.
For the past 4 years Yoshida has been visiting and photographing major
and minor megalithic sites in Europe, from Sweden to Spain. Camping at
or near the sites, she often spends the entire night photographing the
stones by the light of stars and the moon. The resulting images capture
much of the stones’ elemental qualities – these stones are
literally the Earth – but she also records their ethereal human-ness,
the evidences of the countless hours of thought and work that brought
these particular stones to these particular spaces.
Yoshida writes, “I see the stones as representing the indestructible
life force—what in Japanese is called shibui, a quality of strict
simplicity, the reduction of a thing or a process to its most essential
nature. They are about being a link in an infinite chain that stretches
back through time and forward into the future.” Writing about another
body of moonlit work by Yoshida in The New York Times, Helen Harrison
wrote, “Barbara Yoshida mutes the intensity of her masked, shaman-like
nudes by enveloping them in shadows. Although unclothed, these female
figures are mysterious presences, more phantom than flesh.” In
this work Yoshida has gone a step further, transforming these solid
stones of the planet Earth into phantoms.
Barbara Yoshida was born in Portland, Oregon. After graduating
from the University of Washington in Seattle she moved to New York City
and studied at the Art Students League then earned an MFA in painting from Hunter
College of the City University of New York. She has exhibited
world-wide, with recent exhibits in Paris, Finland, Japan, Kansa, India, and
Poland,
with two upcoming exhibits in Scotland in 2006. She has work
in many museums and collections around the world.
