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Film still featuring white flower moving against blue sky

Louise Noguchi. Film still from Crack, 2000. Single channel DVD, video projection, colour, sound, Running Time: 3 Minutes. Art Gallery of Ontario. Purchased with financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance program and with the assistance of the E. Wallace Fund, 2004. © Louise Noguchi. 2004/43

Louise Noguchi: Selected Works, 1986-2000

Opening January 18, 2025

Located on Level 2 in Irving & Sylvia Ungerman (230) and Jennings Young Galleries (231) 
Admission is always FREE for AGO Members, AGO Annual Passholders & Ontarians 25 and under. Learn more.

EXHIBITION OVERVIEW

For more than five decades, distinguished Toronto artist Louise Noguchi has been working in sculpture, installation, photography, and video. Unifying her work is a conviction that identity is not given—but constructed—shaped by events, beliefs, and circumstance. Spotlighting Noguchi’s work in video and sculpture, the AGO’s Associate Curator of Canadian Art Renée van der Avoird brings together three works from the AGO collection.

Reverberating with sound, Noguchi’s looping video work Crack (2000) sees the artist performing as an assistant in a wild-west act, holding out flowers only to have them suddenly cut down mid-air by the lash of whip.

Noguchi’s large sculptural installation Fruits of Belief: The Grand Landscape (1986) brings together a head, a cornucopia, and a photographic reproduction of Thomas Gainsborough’s 1770s painting, A Grand Landscape, to examine our shared relationship to nature—as something real, constructed, and imaginary.

By contrast, the third work in this exhibition, Noguchi’s 1990–91 mirror sculpture Eden, addresses themes of surveillance and freedom, asking: are we approaching paradise, or withdrawing from it?

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in Toronto in 1958, Noguchi graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1981, and immediately embarked on a very successful career, working primarily in sculpture, photography, and installation. Noguchi attended the University of Windsor in the late 1990s, receiving her MFA in 2000 and was a professor in the Art and Art History Program at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College. Her works have been included in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally, most notably in Louise Lawler, Louise Noguchi, Beauty Supply, Toronto (2023);  Contemporary Photographic Art In Canada: The Space of Making, a circulating exhibition co-produced with Neuer Berliner Kuntsverein, Berlin and VOX, Montreal (2005); document (solo exhibition), Dazibao, Montreal (2004); The Language of the Rope, New Gallery, Calgary (2004); and In Light, Art Gallery of Ontario (2002).  

 

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