Satoyama Storehouse
Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Japan
Satoyama Storehouse is an art project Vivian Reiss created for the prestigious Echigo-Tsumari Triennial, the largest international art exhibition in Japan. The project consists of a series of intensely personal paintings of the inhabitants of Hachi, a small rice farming village in the mountains of Japan which is slowly shrinking as farming loses its prestige in Japanese society.
To create the artwork, Reiss lived in the village for three months, visiting rice fields, homes, kimono factories, and shrines, coming to deeply experience the culture and soul of her subjects, which she portrayed in her portraits.
El Museo del Jardín de la Humanidad
Gardiner Museum, Toronto
El Museo del Jardín de la Humanidad was a show of portraits of immigrant Mexican farmworkers who plant and harvest in Southern Ontario’s farms and nurseries, along with paintings of Reiss’ farm garden in Toronto. The Show was sponsored and organized by the Consulate of Mexico and The Cultural Attache of Mexico.
Endless Day Into Night and Counting Sheep
Reiss Gallery, Toronto
What do we perceive when we are awake during the hours in which we normally dream? In Vivian Reiss’ “Endless Day into Night”, the artist delights in bringing the experience of a night out of the dark.
The exhibition has a dream-like quality and explores things that come out in the night, like the toys on your bedroom floor that come to life when the lights go out.
“Counting sheep” is something you do when you can’t sleep at night: behind your closed eyes, you watch sheep all engaged in the same activity, jumping through your head in an evenly spaced flat symmetrical arch. Here with more compositional complexity are the sheep.