Fumi Ishino: Tinted Lines

July 1 - August 31, 2021
Assembly OVR

We are pleased to announce the release of Fumi Ishino’s third monograph, Tinted Lines, published by torch press, in conjunction with a new series of related sculptural works and photographs available exclusively through Assembly.

Following rowing a tetrapod (MACK, 2018) and his limited-edition artist book Index of Fillers (Assembly, 2021), Ishino's latest publication Tinted Lines (torch press, 2021) extends his interest in cultural intersection, displacement, hybridity, and the gaze, through a walking tour of Los Angeles. Through his distinctive use of sequencing, lighting, and composition, Ishino questions the discourses of space, ownership, and belonging. From gated communities, redevelopment areas, public facilities, museums, and suburbs, to neighborhoods segregated by race or ethnicity, concealed boundaries form layers of social constructs that limit access to outsiders. Ishino’s photographs argue that the contour of these borders can be redefined by repositioning one’s body, and that photography can act as a witness to this process while it smudges the specification of socially categorized spaces. These photographs portray words and spaces that indicate social belonging, power, and control. By rendering them in an inverted context, as unfamiliar visual languages, Tinted Lines questions how these dislocated codes reframe the discourse of ownership when the paradigm of inside and outside, private and public, is ripped, overpainted, and collaged.

In addition to the photobook, Tinted Lines is available for exhibition and acquisition as a set of editioned photographs and a unique, sculptural translation of the work, which merges and regenerates the images from the publication and outtakes in order to illustrate the interface of divided spaces. Using water, an absent but essential representation of Los Angeles, as well as a fluid of historic cultural interaction, Ishino deconstructs, blurs, and collages the information of the images and spaces through dissolving the emulsion of OHP film. The reproduced images are then scanned and reprinted on OHP film again, like pasted, overlaid, and ripped posters on a billboard.

Fumi Ishino is an artist based in Los Angeles and Tokyo whose work explores issues of meaning, cultural interpretation, and the constructed space primarily through photography and installation. He holds an MFA from Yale University where he was awarded the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship. Other awards include the Japan Photo Award, 2015 and the Honorable Mention Award from New Cosmos Photography, 2015. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions including Fraenkel Gallery, the FLAG Art Foundation, and Houston Center for Photography, and has been featured in publications including Aperture, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, and AnOther. His project, rowing a tetrapod, was published in 2017 by MACK books and in March 2021, he released a self-published monograph, Index of Fillers, with Assembly.