Ciler (Alexis Mata) takes on ukiyo-e iconography through intervention techniques and Kabuki theatre performers’ portrait distortion, firstly made by Uchida Kuichi in the Meiji period (1868-1912). It is parting from the simultaneity of continuous and discontinuous visuals that this photographs’ subjects and characters -kept alive through this period (shashin: real copy) and presented using the ukiyo-e’s-, with which the artist displays new meanings of the “pictures of a floating word” concept.
All three pictures chosen for this assignment, juxtapose the displacement of the original representations, as they dialogue with the ukiyo-e’s, from the engravings to the photographies. Such displacement along foundations and visual mechanisms allows a new way to look at the same reference: Kabuki theatre performers.
The artwork, conceived as an installation, represents itself the ukiyo-e term, metaphorically -“pictures of a floating word”- by reflecting each photograph on its black water mirrors.
