Noriko Furunishi at Minneapolis Institute of Arts

The MIA has just started a new exhibition space--new pictures--devoted to contemporary photography, this show is only the second that they have had in this odd little space. The work of Noriko Furunishi is large photographs mostly in California, made with a 4 x 5 camera and then photoshopped until, they become "seamless" landscapes. Furunishi layers twisting, turning pathways through the landscapes on top of one another until the perspective of the space becomes multifaceted. These works are important in this museum since the MIA has a truly excellent collection of ink scroll paintings of Japanese landscapes on silk, my favorite is Hidaka Tetsuo's Floating Mist on Distant Peaks (1858). While viewers seemed to stroll past the monumental scroll paintings (some as large at 50 inches long), in the gallery with Furunishi's photographs I noticed people standing for several minutes tracing the pathways that weave through the photographs, much as I imagine people would have done at one time through the scroll paintings. Rather than simply staring at the photographs, there was lots of discussion about which ways the paths went in the landscape depicted in the photograph. I had the strange sense that Furunishi's work perhaps revitalized a dialogue that I would have heard around the scrolls at one time. Furunishi'photographs, like Tetsuo's painting, engages the spectator in a different way of looking at a landscape.