PRESS RELEASE PHOTO LA 2020 Duo show Booth B02 With the support of Centre national des arts plastiques (National Centre for Visual Arts) France. Florian RUIZ / The White Contamination / Project 596 The White Contamination series, 0,453 Bq, 2013 Pigment print on Japanese Mulberry Paper, Size: 291/8 x 62 inches ©Florian Ruiz courtesy galerie Sit Down Chantal STOMAN / Ōmecittà Ōmecittà series, My darling Clementine, 1946, Glenn Miller, 1954, 2017 Chromogenic print Size: 27 x 40 inches ©Chantal Stoman courtesy galerie Sit Down For its first participation in Photo LA, Sit Down gallery is pleased to present the work of two French photographers, Chantal Stoman and Florian Ruiz. Both of whom were interested in the same territory, Japan, but in two different time-spaces. Florian Ruiz completed his exploration outside of Japanese territory. Chantal Stoman examines the exceptional link between a small forgotten city, Ōme, and the cinema from abroad. She wishes to awaken and reveal this episode from a forgotten past, the traces of which still transpire on the city billboards. Through a mastery of color close to the Kodachrome, of very cinematic framing, it is a trip to Japan from another era towards which we are guided. She convokes reality to invoke the past, trying to give life back to Ōme. Through two series, The White Contamination and Project 596, Florian Ruiz questions and documents the relationship between human and nature through photographs attesting to the presence of radioactivity in Japanese and Chinese landscapes. In both series, the photographer wonders how invisibility can appear in a picture, here the invisibility of radioactivity, and tries to highlight its presence within these desolate landscapes. Florian RUIZ With The White Contamination series, Florian Ruiz (winner of the 2018 Sony Prize) captured the invisible pain of radiation in the snowy landscapes of the heights of Fukushima after the nuclear accident. The photographer measured the radioactive contamination with a Geiger counter, in becquerels (Bq), a unit that expresses the disintegration of the atom and the number of its mutations per second. By a process of staggered superimpression, Florian Ruiz hoped to catch the fleeting moments, the movements of climatic phenomena and the ever-shifting perceptions of nature, where radiation accumulates the most. A feeling of malaise and danger underlies these white spaces, inspired by the aesthetics of traditional Japanese prints. Following his project, The White Contamination, Florian Ruiz presents Project 596, a photographic work realized from 2014 to 2019 in which the photographer focuses on the old salt lake Lop Nor, in China, located in the Xinjiang province in the northwest of the country. Now almost dried-up, it served as a nuclear weapon testing site from 1964 to 1996. Nowadays, the region is still very contaminated, and in 2008, China recognized the presence of health problems among civilians and military personnel due to radiation exposure. Florian Ruiz reveals the presence of radioactivity by measuring the radioactive contamination with a Geiger counter, as for The White Contamination. He wanted to show, by a digital process, a reality modified by the presence of invisible radioactivity. The process reinvents and twists the very landscape, leading to a kind of vertigo or malaise, a threatening danger hidden behind the landscapes. Here too, Florian Ruiz succeeds in sublimating the ugliness of these spaces, creating beautiful pale blue landscapes. Florian Ruiz’s photography is resolutely representative of atmospheres. For him, it’s a question of translating a subjective universe of impression: the image is present to translate the emotion, the feeling that a landscape gives us. Through the two series gathered here, Florian Ruiz sees and shows landscapes resulting from a chaotic and unstable world, while underlining the permanence of beauty within them. BIOGRAPHY Born in 1972, Florian Ruiz lives and works in Japan. Florian Ruiz is a French photographer who creates projects to express atmospheres, feelings, and sensations of desolate places. In his recent works, he seeks to test the boundaries of photography by challenging its ability to render an image of what is invisible to the eye by means of time and distortion. He uses assembly, collage, super impression; processes that reinvent and transform the actual landscape. He favors a pinhole camera to portray the unexpected, the fortuitous, and the deformed as a multiple reality. AWARDS 2018 Lens Culture Art Photography Awards: special jury prize Sony World Photography Award for Creativity 2017 ‘Bourse du Talent’ prize: ‘Coup de coeur’ of the jury (landscape section). Felix Schoeller Photo Award: nominee. 2016 Fine Art Photographer of the year ‘Bourse du Talent’: finalist Moscow Foto Awards: honorable mention Arpia prize: nominee QPN Award: finalist 2015 LensCulture Earth Awards: finalist QPN Award: finalist 2014 Arpia prize: nominee 2013 International Emerging Artist Award: finalist EXHIBITIONS 2019 The White Contamination, galerie Sit Down at The Photography Show by AIPAD, New York, USA 2018 LensCulture’s emerging talents group show, The Aperture gallery, New York, USA The White Contamination, galerie Sit Down at PARIS PHOTO, Paris, France Sony World Photography Award laureates, Somerset House, London, England Sony Imaging Gallery, Tokyo, Japan Palazzo Trigona, Italy Royal Villa of Monza, Italy Willy Brandt Haus, Berlin, Germany Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Lille, France 2017 ‘Bourse du talent’ exhibition, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris Cultural History Museum, Osnabrück, Germany 2014 Blind Pilots Project, Thessaloniki, Greece 2013 Month of Photography, Bratislava, Slovakia 2010 Photography Festival "Some photographers, some Japans" in Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka, Japan 2005-2007 Angkor Photography Festival, Cambodia ‘Chroniques nomades’ festival at Honfleur, France Vendôme festival, France International festival of Aleppo, Syria PUBLICATIONS (Group) Lens Earth, 2015 From Here Now, 2015 PRESS MATERIALS (Upon request) • Florian RUIZ The White Contamination The White Contamination series, 0,363 Bq, 2014 Pigment print on Japanese Mulberry Paper Size: 145/8 x 311/2 inches ©Florian Ruiz courtesy galerie Sit Down The White Contamination series, 0,335 Bq, 2013 Pigment print on Japanese Mulberry Paper Size: 145/8 x 311/2 inches ©Florian Ruiz courtesy galerie Sit Down The White Contamination series, 0,357 Bq, 2017 Pigment print on Japanese Mulberry Paper Size: 291/8 x 62 inches ©Florian Ruiz courtesy galerie Sit Down • Florian RUIZ Project 596 Project 596 series, 0,734 Bq, 2014-2019 Pigment print Size: 23 5/8 x 311/2 inch ©Florian Ruiz courtesy galerie Sit Down Project 596 series, 0,562 Bq, 2014-2019 Pigment print Size (overall):35 3/8 x 941/2 inches ©Florian Ruiz courtesy galerie Sit Down Project 596 series, 0,531 Bq, 2014-2019 Pigment print Size: 23 5/8 x 315/8 inches ©Florian Ruiz courtesy galerie Sit Down Chantal STOMAN / Ōmecitta “Ōme is an unknown city. Unknown in Japan. Unknown to tourism. I came across Ōme by chance. A small village north west of Tokyo, which inevitably brings out the most beautiful scenes of the great classics of cinema.” Chantal Stoman Despite its poetic name, Ōme meaning “the blue plum” is a small, somewhat dreary town in the greater suburbs of Tokyo. Far, far away from the red carpet and the glitz of the Cannes Film Festival, yet the cinema is everywhere: in shop windows, the pediments of houses, the carpark gates, the sides of buildings; the city is covered with painted panels of cinema posters. The stars of these posters vary between Lawrence of Arabia, East of Eden, La Strada, Casablanca, Bonnie and Clyde… providing a magnificent journey into a glorious past that reveals the mysterious cinematic nature of Japan in the 1940s. After the war, the city had three cinemas specializing in the screening of national and international films, making Ōme a paradise for Japanese film lovers. However, in the 1970s, with the arrival of television, cinema attendance declined, and cinemas closed their doors, leaving hundreds of film posters as the remnants of the old cinema. Then, in the 1990s, retro became fashionable, and the city decided to revive its past with a street display of a hundred reproductions of posters painted by local artist, Bankan Kubo. Born in 1941 in a modest family, Bankan Kubo, born Noboru Kubo, did not have the means to go to the cinema as a child. He was simply content to look at the film posters; they fascinated him. As soon as a film schedule changed, he would take the schedule from the previous showings home and copy it. This passion lead to him taking the name Bankan: the reverse of the word ‘kanban,’ which means poster. In autumn 2017, fascinated by Ōme and its painted panels that showed a journey through time, Chantal Stoman launched Ōmecittà. Ōmecittà tells the story of an exceptional relationship with the past, memory and art, but also the story of a downfall. Immediately published in Le Monde, the photographer realized the enthusiasm that his work provoked and decided to return to Ōme to continue this project. Ōmecitta is therefore the meeting between a French artist, passionate about Japan, cinema, and a dazzling city, the Japanese Cinecitta. But it is also the story of an exaltation, one for the cinema, which evaporated with the passage of Man and is fully part of his identity. Ōmecittà is based on absence, absence that creates our imagination and helps to transform it. The images taken at Ōme rest in this dialect between what is made visible and what is visible testifies to absence. Photographing the city of Ōme is like searching for lost time. BIOGRAPHY Chantal Stoman is a French, Paris-based photographer. The work of Chantal Stoman is part of an approach based on a thorough observation of the relationship between man and his intimacy and the City. She began with A WOMAN’S OBSESSION, observing the special relationship between Japanese women and the world of European luxury brands.