High Line Art & EAI Present: SHIGEKO KUBOTA: ROCK VIDEO: CHERRY BLOSSOM
Spring comes to the High Line in the exuberant form of Shigeko Kubota's iconic video work, Rock Video: Cherry Blossom (1986). EAI is pleased to collaborate with High Line Art, the public art program presented by Friends of the High Line, to present Kubota's silent video on High Line Channel 22. This outdoor screening, projected on a building to the east of the High Line at West 22nd Street, will be visible from the park's Seating Steps as well as from the sidewalk below. Rock Video: Cherry Blossom will be on view daily from Thursday, March 13 through Monday, April 20, 2014 from 6:00 – 11:00 PM.
Pale pink cherry blossoms against a bright blue sky are the starting point for Shigeko Kubota's Rock Video: Cherry Blossom, as the artist uses vivid electronic processing techniques to manipulate and transform the delicate images. Achieving striking visual transmutations, Kubota layers, colorizes, and ultimately abstracts the blossoms, creating a dynamic convergence of the natural and the technological. A prominent member of the international Fluxus art movement of the 1960s, Shigeko Kubota has created an extensive body of sculptures, multi-media installations, and videos over the past five decades. Focusing on several interconnected themes, Kubota’s interdisciplinary work often pays direct homage to the influences of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. Her works also reflect the Buddhist environment in which she was raised, and make reference to traditional Japanese motifs of nature and landscape. Kubota, who moved to New York from Tokyo in 1964 at the invitation of Fluxus founding member George Maciunas, has also chronicled her life on video as an ongoing diaristic project. Throughout her works in sculpture, installation and video, Kubota has forged a distinctive confluence of the organic and the technological, applying her signature electronic processing techniques to images and objects from nature, art history, and everyday life.
Shigeko Kubota was born in 1937 in Niigata, Japan. She received a B.A. in sculpture from Tokyo University of Education, and studied at New York University and the New School for Social Research. In 1964, she moved to New York; in the same year she became the Vice Chairman of the Fluxus Organization. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts, and was video artist-in-residence at both Brown University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kubota is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship in Berlin, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, New York State Council on the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and an NEA/Visual Arts grant. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Toyama Museum of Art, Japan. Kubota’s video sculptures, installations and videos have been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Rene Block Gallery, New York; The Museum of Modern Art (Projects), New York; Documentas 6 and 8, Kassel, Germany; Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany; Kunsthaus, Zurich; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Kulturhuset, Stockholm; Japan Society, New York; The Kitchen, New York; New Langton Arts, San Francisco; Kongress Halle, Berlin; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. She participated in the 1990 Venice Biennale and the 1990 Sydney Biennale. A retrospective of her work was presented at the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York in 1991. In 1996, she was the subject of a one person show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Kubota lives in New York.