Japan
Michael Danner

exhibition venue: Gwynne Warehouse Gallery

A cable-car carries me from the sunlit glow of the plain, past radiant autumn woods, up into the mountains. For the last few hundred yards to the top, I stumble along on foot over bleak black rocks, through mists and bitterly cold winds that penetrate my very bones. My hands are red with the cold.


From this lofty height, Japan, the subject of my work, lies before me in all its dazzling splendour. Over the past few weeks, I have explored and befriended this place, teasing out images, discovering the familiar in the unfamiliar. The tension between strangeness and familiarity itself has become part of my work and has shaped my responses to the element of exotic mystique that so often clouds Western views of the Far East.


My images seek to describe Japan as a specific locality. I sought out codes and structures in the country's geography that, to me, stood for the specifics of this place. Certain events have become embedded within my images or are obliquely present in them from a distance. The context in which these pictures were taken is of secondary importance. The image as object forms the centre of attention and invites the viewer to enter into a dialogue. My work not least also retraces a journey to my own self and leaves room for questions that the individual viewer can formulate out of the context of his or her own life experience.

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