Born in 1994 in Oita Prefecture, where she is currently based, Shiori Tono completed her MA in Arts and Design at Onomichi City University, specializing in oil painting. Tono uses photographs from her childhood albums and photographs she has taken herself as motifs in her work, giving expression to the fragility and preciousness of those pure memories that come to us in unexpected moments. Past memories are obliterated through the day-to-day accumulation of information in our minds—at times, abstracted or fragmented.
Read MoreTono engages with these universal experiences, skillfully representing the ambiguous nature of memory on canvas as warped and deteriorating images, often imitating the noise apparent in digital images. The specific years in which the original photos were taken vary: the more obscure the memory, the more warped the painted image becomes, making it more difficult to make out any figures clearly.
However, even from largely forgotten memories, Tono recovers the fragments that still remain in her mind, carefully giving life to them again square by square in a three-centimeter-by-three-centimeter grid. Using masking tape to create a grid in which every other line is exposed, the process of adding oil paint from one end of the canvas to the other is an act of proving the existence of Tono herself.
Recent solo exhibitions include fragments of memory, MASAHIRO MAKI GALLERY* (Tokyo, 2020) and Anohino, Gallery Bar Baku (Hiroshima, 2018). She has also participated in several group exhibitions mainly in Tokyo. Additionally, her works garnered attention when exhibited in Taiwan for the first time at ART TAIPEI 2019.
*renamed MAKI Gallery in June 2020
Text courtesy MAKI.
