Leah Raintree Reimagines Noguchi Sculptures as Celestial Objects

Artist Leah Raintree has reinterpreted 10 Isamu Noguchi sculptures in a photographic series at the visionary artist’s namesake museum in Queens, New York. Another Land: After Noguchi draws inspiration and takes its name from a 1968 piece from Noguchi’s collection of granite “landscape tables” that he fabricated in his later years.
 

In each iteration, Raintree depicts a different Noguchi sculpture as a distant celestial object partially shrouded in darkness. “[Each] photograph … acknowledges the sculpture in relationship to its surroundings, but the object is no longer bound to Earth and seemingly extends into the void left below it,” Raintree explains to Matthew Kirsch, the Noguchi Museum’s associate curator.
 

Raintree conceptualized her series after viewing detailed images of a comet captured on the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission. “As the relationship between the camera, the comet, and the light changed, so did the image,” Raintree recalls. “Their interaction was sculptural, a phenomenon ultimately captured through photography.” Using these images as a framework, Raintree recasts Noguchi’s work, giving an otherworldly dimension to his landscape-driven sculptures.
 

Another Land: After Noguchi is on display now through January 9, 2017, at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City.