Shiori Tono and Pixellated Memory

Fragments of memory, centimetre by centimetre. Somewhere between Seurat’s pointillism and Invader’s mosaics, Shiori Tono draws a grid over printed photographs as if to retrieve a partially lost memory, before transferring the image onto canvas, square by square.

Lost images

The artist, born in Oita Prefecture in 1994 and the recipient of the Wasaku Kobayashi Encouragement Prize in 2018, always goes through the same process: on a photograph, she makes 3 x 3-cm squares using masking tape. She then uses paint to reproduce these squares on a canvas, one after the other—the adjacent square is therefore hidden when the paint is applied. Thus, the masking tape is stuck and removed several times, causing the image to deteriorate gradually, in an allegory of the loss of memory that is already fragmented. The artist’s inspirations include photographs found in family archives or that she took herself, like one of an unusual house spotted while on a walk, the edges of which fade into the surrounding vegetation.

In a society overloaded with digital images, these are neglected and get lost in the crowd, while others are compressed and pixellated in order to be stored. ‘Shiori Tono captures these unstable, uncertain “memories” objectively, calmly observing their incompleteness and non-sequentiality as she turns them into artworks’, summarises the text accompanying an exhibition of her work at the Maki Gallery in Tokyo.

Shiori Tono’s work can be viewed on her website.