"Under My Skin #1"

Kei Ito is a Baltimore-based conceptual photographer and installation artist. He graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art with an MFA in Photography. Ito has exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Ito’s unique approach to photography does not include a camera. Instead, he exposes light sensitive materials to sunlight to create an x-ray like print that recalls a history of nuclear tragedy in Hiroshima. Specifically, Ito’s practice draws on his grandfather’s experience of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. He intertwines this past experience with his contemporary moment, expanding on the dialogue of nuclear matters in today’s politics. Ito remembers his grandfather telling him the day the bomb was dropped “...was like hundreds of suns lighting up the sky.” Those words pervade Ito’s body of work, and he often uses the sun in his work as both a symbol of the bombing and a natural photographic medium.

Ito’s newer works including Under My Skin #1 use honey and oil to create microscopic patterns reminiscent of cancer cells, a reference to the unseen illness that hid under the skin of atomic bomb survivors. This creates a powerful abstract representation of the physical effects of nuclear warfare. Ito details how the scarcity of basic medicine after the bomb left survivors to treat their burns with oils and honey they found lying around, which are used in the photographic process. The Under My Skin series represents a shift in Ito’s work from the sun exposed C-print photograms to the more physical and gestural use of natural materials to create an almost painterly print.

Kei Ito

2020

Image Courtesy of the Artist