The Masur Museum of Art has teamed up with the Outside Gallery downtown!
This exhibition is located at the Outside Gallery of Art Alley in Monroe, Louisiana.
“Today, Some people think that the light of the atom bomb will change the concept of painting once and for all. The eyes that actually saw the light melted out of sheer ecstasy. For one instant, everybody was the same color. It made angels out of everybody.” -Willem de Kooning
Baltimore artist Kei Ito’s exhibition It Made Angels Out of Everybody deals with themes of loss and danger in the atomic age. Ito’s pictures have a ghost-like, irradiated appearance that gives visual form to the transience of our earthly existence, as well as forces we cannot see. His work serves as a dramatic reminder that history is cyclical and that humankind is often, with great creativity, the agent of our own destruction.
Kei Ito’s Statement
In the high summer of 1945, a specially modified B-29 called Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb named Little Boy onto the city of Hiroshima. My grandfather, only a fifteen-year-old boy at the time, was exposed to and witnessed the light that took away his family. Many years later, it took his life in the form of cancer. I remember him saying that day in Hiroshima was like hundreds of suns lighting up the sky.
These prints were made by exposing a Type-C photographic paper to sunlight. The inverted image of an airplane was formed by placing the shadow of a model of the Enola Gay onto the light-sensitive paper. The real Enola Gay delivered the purest light. The light vaporized entire bodies of innocents, leaving only their shadows.
The light cast by the innocent Little Boy on that fatal day created the darkest shadow known in history. Should the future bear witness to this light, there will be none left to be called angels.
More information about Ito can be found by clicking here.
Featured thumbnail: Kei Ito, Harbinger, Digital print of Type-C photographic paper exposed to the sun, 2017, Courtesy of the artist.
