Shadow play: in her layered, time-based photograms and other cameraless images of flowers, animals and people, Kunie Sugiura explores stasis and movement, order and chance

Art in America, April, 2002 by Janet Koplos

Photograms, those ghostly records of light deflected by artfully arranged objects on photosensitive paper, took on new life--literally--in Kunie Sugiura's hands. One of her distinctive avenues early on was to use living, moving creatures as subjects. Her traveling show of work from 1989 to '99 opened with The Kitten Papers (1992), in which she corraled two kittens overnight on an expanse of photo paper. She repeated the procedure for a week, and the result was a group of seven unique gelatin-silver prints in which the forms of the kittens are partly visible--presumably where they slept--and streaks indicate their movement. In addition, there are splatters and pours of urine, which created splotches of color. One imagines the artist coming into the studio in the morning, picking up the soiled papers and developing them to see a report of the kittens' behavior.

In this work, several principles long present in Sugiura's work are evident. One is time, her constant theme. Another is her engagement with chance. A third is her almost journalistic factuality, without technical tweaking, as it happens, even without using a camera. This straightforwardness has been true of nearly all Sugiura's art, even before the period covered by this exhibition and the new work shown in December and January at Leslie Tonkonow gallery in New York's Chelsea. Her low-key "reporting" can be seen, for example, in her paintinglike works that were included in the 1972 Whitney Biennial: abstracted enlargements of tiny architectural or natural details such as tree bark, which she printed on photosensitized canvas and sometimes embellished with acrylic.

Sugiura (it's pronounced with a hard g, and her first name is koo-nieh) came to the U.S. from Japan in 1963 to study photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York in 1968. She chose photograms as a way of making pictures with a minimum of equipment and technology. She needs only light, photosensitive paper, an object to block the light and chemicals to fix the image afterward. In its original state, a photogram is a negative. Where the subject has been, the paper remains pale, while a surplus of light blackens the page. Sugiura often uses the photogram as a paper negative to print a positive, in which the subject becomes a black silhouette.

Flowers

The earliest work in the traveling show was Tower (1989), a dark still life centered on a glass vase containing ferns and a few small blossoms. The vase, which seems to float in a sea of curls, spatters and rivulets of black, is a milky, translucent object with a circle of intense white at its shoulder level. As a whole, the image seems eerie and unfamiliar, more portentous than domestic.

Subsequent works with flowers demonstrate an interest in visual order: laid out carefully on photographic paper, the flowers are never scattered but always arranged in some sort of pattern. In a 1990 piece, roses with long, spindly stems are placed to form a sunburst, their blossoms defining a central spiral and their stems radiating outward. The background is a cloudscape that is toned slightly pinkish. Since then, Sugiura has engaged in a great many variations: lilies set in parallel vertical lines, blossoms meeting in the middle of the paper or marching along the top and bottom borders; tulips thatched in an organic grid; sets of five tulips, blossoms at the left and right margins of the paper, stems and leaves making a ragged musical staff. In these works, geometry is the ordering principle, but nature's imperfection controls the impression. The blossoms may be dark (positive) or light (negative), and in the latter case the exposing light caresses the flowers, giving either a hint of contour or an appearance of translucence.

In other flower works, Sugiura has separated blossoms from their stems and strung the flower heads on wires. She threads different kinds of blooms on relaxed wires that join together in a single "stem," like some miraculously grafted composite. She sets others on radiating taut wires that look precisely suspended in an ambiguous deep space suggested by a dark, smoky background. She also places small leaves along horizontally stretched wires, where they recall birds gracefully gathered on telephone wires.

The life in the flower photograms is quite stilled, of course. The flowers are cut and have begun a process of wilting and desiccation that is halted in the image. The systematic arrangements of the flower works contrast sharply with the free organization of the creature works.

Creatures

Besides the kittens, Sugiura has taken as her subjects various small aquatic creatures such as octopi, squids and frogs that she could obtain (sometimes alive) in Chinatown, near her studio. In making these pieces, she sets the conditions, chooses the background colors and edits to select the most satisfying results. The live animals can't be choreographed, so the composition of an image is largely random. The time span involved in her subjects' movements is captured in a manner that is nonfilmic because it is not sequential, yet it is also not quite ordinary photography because the evidence of time is layered into the surface rather than caught in a decisive moment.