Rare Books
"The collages Okanoue began creating as a student at Bunka Gakuin College, which she entered to study fashion drawing, fluttered to earth as pure, private 'droplets of dreams' unrelated to artistic ambition ... Toshiko Okanoue's photo collages are, if we are to look at them in terms of where they fit into artistic lineages, unquestionably Surrealist; they instantly call to mind the collages of Max Ernst. Shuzo Takiguchi, who discovered Okanoue, insisted, however, that her work was not derivative ... Okanoue has said that she often went in search of collage materials to the Seishido bookstore, which had stacks of American illustrated magazines such as Life and Vogue out in front ... To Okanoue, whose country had been at war throughout her girlhood, the images with which those American magazines were filled were undoubtedly like dreams from another world--as they would have been to almost any Japanese person at that time. But the dreams that she assembled by quietly cutting out photographs from those illustrated magazine and gluing them together opened doors to transposing and rearranging the dreams that materialistic American civilization so lavishly spun ... With this exhibition, the dream droplets that Toshiko Okanoue sowed in mid twentieth century Japan will gently make their presence felt here at the beginning of a new century. And once again women will without a doubt hear these words in her collages: We are free!"--From introduction.
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