Fergus McCaffrey is pleased to announce Seven/Seven: The Fraught Landscape, opening at the gallery’s Tokyo location on Saturday, January 22, 2022.
This exhibition serves as a conceptual sequel to Fergus McCaffrey’s historic 2019 New York exhibition, Japan Is America. Continuing Japan Is America’s exploration of the Japanese-American creative exchange, Seven/Seven furthers this transatlantic narrative, applying a cinematic lens to the joint cultural landscape, taking its title from Akira Kurasawa’s Japanese epic Seven Samurai (1954), and the iconic Western film by John Sturges The Magnificent Seven (1960) that followed suit.
Focusing on a selection of works made by artists predominantly from 1985 to 2021, Seven/Seven considers the ways in which conscience and self-assertion manifests core concerns for both Eastern and Western contemporary artists. Departing from the archetypes of the epic and the Western, Seven/Seven contemplates the transformative process by which a sequence of static images becomes a moving film; presenting works that engage with the dynamism, drama, and individualistic nature of these genres by artists whose committed path to their craft and vision is the stuff of which epics are made.
The dozen or more artists whose work is presented throughout Seven/Seven represent widely aesthetically varied perspectives on the social, political and artistic milieus of both Japan and the United States. Seven/Seven is both historical and contemporary, while remaining rooted in filmic concepts—drawing important, urgent connections between today’s most compelling Japanese and American artists.
Artists include: Cecily Brown, Anna Conway, Francesca Gabbiani, Milford Graves, David Hammons, Tatsuo Ikeda, Tomoke Konoike, Shigeko Kubota, Hiroshi Nakamura, Richard Nonas, Ed Ruscha, Shoji Ueda, Joseph Olisaemeka Wilson
Image: Ed Ruscha, Japan Is America, 2020 © Ed Ruscha