Artists | MAKI Gallery | MAKI

Born in 1994 in Oita Prefecture, where she continues to live and work today, Shiori Tono completed her MA in Arts and Design at Onomichi City University, specializing in oil painting. Tono draws from childhood photo albums and photographs she has taken herself, using her work to deftly express the fragility and preciousness of those fleeting recollections that come to us in unexpected moments. As our minds absorb and accumulate increasing amounts of information every day, existing memories become buried, sometimes even abstracted or fragmented. Tono engages with this universal experience by skillfully depicting the ambiguous nature of memory as warped and deteriorating images on canvas, often imitating the distortion found in old digital files. The specific years in which the original photos were taken vary; the more obscure the memory, the more fractured the painted image becomes, making it increasingly difficult to identify the pictured subject. Yet despite the inevitable fact that most memories are eventually lost, Tono carefully gathers the fragments that remain in her mind, resurrecting them square by square on a three-centimeter-by-three-centimeter grid. Using masking tape to create a lattice in which every other line is exposed, the process of layering oil paint from one end of the canvas to the other is the artist’s attempt to document her own existence.
Tono’s recent solo exhibitions include あって ない / Atte nai, MAKI Gallery (Tokyo, 2022); fragments of memory, MAKI Gallery (Tokyo, 2020); and Anohino, Gallery Bar Baku (Hiroshima, 2018). She has also participated in multiple group shows, primarily in Tokyo. In 2023, the artist marked her North American debut at The Armory Show, where her work garnered significant attention from the public.