Press release

Mariko Mori
22 June – 8 September 1996

For the first time in France, Mariko Mori will exhibit her photographic works in the Project Room of Le Magasin. A 16 page catalogue will be published on this occasion.

At first a fashion model, Mariko Mori studied stylism and followed the Independant Study Program of The Whitney Museum of American Art of New York.
Her research is underlined by a quest of identity which reflects the epoch, in the time of cyberspace and urban wandering. Critical with regard to the fashion phenomena, she creates clothes which take another function depending on the context. She poses for photographs wearing them in the city, they become symbols of the surrounding culture. Mariko set up the scene in the street, in coffee shops, on the beach, between people. She produces then large photographs with a peculiar technique "crystal print" which pushed the glossy aspect of it, it gives the illusion that they were taken in front of windows. It is often polyptics. The realistic first effect is denied by the fragmentation in units, like the front windows of shops. They are installed most of the time rather low and give the illusion that we could enter in. On the center, Mariko Mori's character, dressed in a futuristic manner, poses. For example in Empty Dream, 1995, made of 7 res. of 2m by 7m, she is a mermaid with blue hair and a tail made with spangles. Lying on the artificially white sand of a fake beach, with in the back an ideal blue sky and upon a glass roof. Another time, she waits dressed as a manga heroin, in the middle of machines of an electronic arcade. Often a plastic capsule is placed on the ground before the photograph, containing the clothes which have been used for the shot.

Mariko Mori, born in 1967 in Tokyo, works and lives in New York.