An ideal destination Westerners seeing through an Eastern lens, Caroline and Mim share a curiosity about and enchantment with Japan. This veritable enigma led them to explore its culture from an outsider’s perspective. Sharing a common history in cinema studies, these two photographers synthesise their contemporary digital perspectives into a duo show that explores nostalgia, veneer and the appearance of the past. Orientalist fantastic romances catalysed these two bodies of work that share a sense of awe and mystery in their collective gaze towards the Other.
Mim’s work is informed by structuralist cinematic conventions, her images take the coded language of cinema, and fracture it in stills. In her series Shot Reverse Shot, she recombines small portions of different films, and introduces characters to create a conversation, a false narrative between two worlds. Sourced from Japanese samurai genre films and their American western remakes, the images question ideas of originality and the cryptomnesia of contemporary cinema. The images, originally on film, then digitized to DVD, are transmitted through an analogue TV, and then finally captured digitally. This generation loss echoes the loss of the grand world of the cinema, now reduced and imprisoned inside televisions.
Conversely, in her series Wonderland – through the looking glass, Caroline’s work is informed by metaphysics and imaginal psychology. Using Alice in Wonderland as a metaphor for her visit to Japan, her images explore a Japanese wonderland – a sacred realm of magical landscapes and spirits. Nostalgia and an outsider’s idealism propelled my quest. ‘My digital camera allowed me to explore parallel, elusive worlds in a way that I found less available within the constraints of analogue film. I had unlimited freedom to capture the mysterious, metaphysical and intangible, aided by light and time. My camera and I sought ancient traces and modern insights, slipping through dimensions. Darkness and light in a smoky patchwork, revealed omnipresent, unconventional dream-worlds. The sacred in the everyday.’
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