Born in Hyogo, Japan, Ishino moved to the United States as an adolescent and since then has lived in and between both places as a self-described alien and minority. Rowing a Tetrapod reconstructs the artist’s hybrid mental landscape, allowing viewers to experience the waves of disorientation and recognition that a foreigner is faced with as an interlocutor of another culture. Images of orbiting satellites, interiors of spaceships, and affirming messages from astronaut Colonel Wheelock ask us to see as he does—as a curious outsider in both places.
Collectively, the photographs aim to disorient the spectator through content and sequencing; staccato shifts in a wide array of subject-matter encourage misinterpretation. Even the title itself is an embrace of absurdity and illegibility. In English, a tetrapod is a four-limbed vertebrate that typically refers to amphibians and reptiles but also includes mammals and primates. Yet in Japanese, a tetrapod refers to a coastal engineering structure used to prevent erosion and coastal drift. Water unites both meanings, yet neither the animal nor the concrete can be moved through a rowing gesture.
Rowing a Tetrapod brings together a fluctuating array of black and white photographs made in multiple locations in the United States and Japan, between which countries emerging artist Fumi Ishino has resided. The work channels his nomadic experience of moving back and forth between two distinct cultures, with divergent social norms and values. Following an aleatoric structure, the book presents images as diverse as Japanese school children, American astronauts, vernacular architecture, laboratory scenes, local cuisines, animals and studio still-lifes. Blurring distinctions between the local and the foreign, the domestic and the cosmic, Rowing a Tetrapod delights in confusing cultural conceptions, fabricating an imaginary space that is bent towards misinterpretation.