From Erin Cluley Gallery: "HIDENORI ISHII’s exhibition UNDER CONSTRUCTION was created during his yearlong keyholder residency at LES (Lower East Side) Printshop in New York City. The works are made from the square plexiglass windows installed on the city’s pervasive green construction barrier walls and are a collaboration with unknown graffiti artists of the area. The series raises questions about the social and economic impact of wealth inequality, gentrification, and the global pandemic. The process begins by Ishii creating screen printed imagery as “tagging” on his own plexiglass window and switching it out with one installed on the street that is already graffitied. The marked windows are then fitted with a backing of screen printed fiber paper mounted on green panel. The prints are composed of enlarged images of American bills of currency – cropped and placed intentionally to interact with the graffiti marks on the surface. The works act as direct responses to events happening at the time of their creation.

The collaborative series began during the pandemic while much of New York City was still shut down. Ishii saw this as an opportunity to view and display art at a time when this concept felt impossible. The artist’s exchanging of the windows brings to mind the exchanging of money and the green walls dividing two different social groups are seen as symbols of the city’s changing landscape – with the graffiti acting as a direct response to this change from its citizens. The juxtaposition of the layered processes with the works visualizes the skewed imbalance of our economy as Ishii compares the currency to art – both an abstract concept, illusionistic, and yet fundamental to our modern life. HIDENORI ISHII’s work investigates the paradoxical dichotomy of civilization and nature through the interdependence which lies in between. The artist reveals a tenuous axis on which the two worlds serendipitously coexist, merging past and future onto a single plane. Ishii’s abstractions in painting and installation invert binaries of nature and camouflage, disaster and neglect, artificiality and object. They are characterized by such negations; images materialize from obstruction and walls eradicate structure. Just as the visible and concealed fluctuate, the work wavers from completion - as though it is still growing, eroding, or waiting for the reflection to break on the water’s surface. The narrative of Ishii’s work exists within a margin of disbelief, reminding us that fiction diverges from fact. His earlier project, IcePlants, was a direct response to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown, and considered how beauty might persist as landscape turns mutant. The possibilities presented in Ishii’s work suggest how we might connect political ecology and social consciousness to face our current climactic crisis. Ishii was born and raised in Yonezawa, Japan. His interest in environmental science brought him to study at university in the US. He is a graduate of the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and a Joan Mitchell MFA Fellowship Nominee. His work has been exhibited widely in numerous group and solo exhibitions in the United States. He currently lives and works in New York. "