Kei Ito: Virtual Artist Talk
Center for Fine Art Photography and Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, in collaboration with Asian Pacific American Cultural Center, welcome visiting artist Kei Ito for a virtual artist talk in conjunction with the exhibition The Beginning, in the land around me.
Featuring five projects spanning 2020-2023, The Beginning, in the land around me centers on the artist's own nuclear heritage as a third-generation hibakusha (atomic bomb victim). The exhibition surveys the shared pasts and traumas of those impacted by nuclear weapons and asks the questions: has war ever ended, and is the price for peace the same as that for wartime?
Join GAMA and C4FAP, in collaboration with APACC, for this special event
Registration Required
About the Artist
Kei Ito is a Japan-born visual artist working primarily with camera-less photography and installation art who is currently teaching at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in NYC. Ito received his BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology followed by his MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art.
Ito's work addresses issues of deep intergenerational loss and connections as he explores the materiality and experimental processes of photography. Ito's work, fundamentally rooted in the trauma and legacy passed down from his late grandfather—a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima—meditates on the complexity of his identity and heritage through examining the past, current trajectories, and visualizing the invisible such as radiation, memory and life/death.
By excavating and uncovering hidden histories connected to his own, Ito utilizes his generational past to use as a case study for contemporary and future events. Many of Ito's artworks transform both art and non-art spaces into temporal monuments that became platforms for the audience to explore social issues and the memorials dedicated to the losses suffered from the consequences of those issues. Within these intertwined pasts, Ito shines a light on power and its relationship to larger global issues that often led to and result in both war and peace alike.
Ito has participated in a number of Artist in Residence programs nationwide including the Studio at MASS MoCA (2021), the Denis Roussel Fellowship at the Center for Fine Art Photography (2021), and the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2019). His internationally-recognized solo and group exhibitions can be read in reviews and articles published by the Washington Post, Hyperallergic, BmoreArt, ArtMaze Magazine, and BBC Culture & Art. His works are included in major institutional collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Norton Museum of Art, Chroma at California Institute of Integral Studies, and the Eskenazi Museum of Art.
