Kozue Hasegawa

I'm interested in creating a feeling of relativism. I make paintings from found photographs and photographs I shoot myself. The selection of the photographs is diverse. In the process of creating painting, I reduce and transform some visual information to avoid giving specificity and to generalize the imagery. The reduction and transformation would be formal elements, such as abstraction of shapes and spaces or removing some visual elements from original photographs. My work has an elusive sense of space. However, I still create the general idea of space, a ballroom, stage and so forth, so that viewers could see the spaces as a place where they have been or seen. My work allows each
viewer to have very different understandings of the same work depending upon the frame of reference that each brings to it.

By being less ichnographically specific, the work becomes more accessible. My aim is to stimulate viewers' emotions, experiences, memories or traumas. I heighten their role in interpreting an artwork and help them to create their own shifting sense of the paintings' reality. I hope that it may never be resolved. When ambiguities are present, understandings are not resolved but create larger understanding that metaphorically reveals a deeper understanding of existence.