Lily in the Glass

(2003/16mm/6min)

A letter no one can read, a character whose face cannot be seen, a room without dimensions...remnants of a narrative that have lost their way, tenuously connected with each other by the flashes between cuts. These flashes are a disorder inherent to the movement of film through a camera. They are also traces (reflections) of the essence of the lens (glass), the existence of which is unseen.

Rosecolored Flower

(2002/DV/12min)

In a somber room, there's a flower at a far window. A hidden movement in this video transforms with the course of time into turns and reverses of the inside and the outside of the room, day and night or light and darkness. However, the flower, the pivot of the movement, collapses its own exsistance as one could hardly tell even the color. Here we loose the core we rely on.

A rose in a glass vase on the windowsill. Soft Vermeer-like light falling into the dusky room, and playing through the crystal-clear water. Most of all, this yields a 'beautiful' picture, well-framed, wonderful colours, tone and shades. Throughout the video, the camera behaves like the eye of someone who wants to drink in this beauty to his heart's content. Concentration and a zen-like focus on the aesthetic experience makes the components unfold. Change of light, shifts of colour, blurred spots, red-and-black counterpoints and more of that kind, build up an intensity that culminates in the viewer's literally being sucked into the image. Or rather, into one single spot which, as a component aspect, probably contains all the beauty of the whole - analogous to the Proustian yellow spot on a wall in Vermeer's 'View on Delft'. Through this wormhole, our gaze disappears, to be chastened and thereby to adopt a totally different perspective.
Vinken & van Kampen (from the online catalogue Netherlands Media Art Institute)

Floating Leaf

(2002/DV/1min)

The leaf is floating slowly in the dark with the song on the radio out of tune.

Incense

(2002/DV/6min)

When we are in the dark, we can see only the sign of the space. The moment the light comes into the room, we can see another space. This space is the incorporated like smoke construction that is composed of the dark, light and time.

Looking closely at a seventeenth-century still life, you will often see how the surroundings of the tableau, which are actually outside the scope of the painting, are nevertheless part of the image. The reflection of a light source in the scale of a fish; a space beyond our field of vision, caught by a mirror on the wall. These are hints that unemphatically enter into our perception, thus creating a suggestion of a larger world than we can see in the foreground. For her video still lifes, Shiho Kano makes use of timeless objects from everyday life: an apple, a rocking chair, and in this case a stick of incense in a glass burner. The stick keeps on burning motionlessly, with so much concentration that you can almost smell its fragrance. Then a scene begins to unfold around it. With light and shadow, time and sound, Kano sketches a room, a door, a space behind the door, and the presence of a human being. Of all these elements, the camera and our eyes only register the traces they leave, just out of focus. Incense concentrates on the shadowy transition between perception and understanding, where meaning is newly born and can still take on all kinds of shapes.
Vinken & van Kampen (from the online catalogue Netherlands Media Art Institute)