Kei Ito: Embodied Spectrum

Truland Gallery

In Embodied Spectrum, Kei Ito brings together language and image in an immersive installation, combining multiple modalities to evoke experiences, relationships, and physical phenomena that are difficult to represent in visual form. Or, as the artist describes it, to “visualize invisible forces.”

Centered on the first photographic image ever taken of the sun, Embodied Spectrum evokes the unique connection between the sun and human-generated nuclear energy. Ito’s work draws in part on his relationship to his grandfather, who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and his own experiences as a third-generation atomic bomb victim living in the United States. Taken in 1845, the image at the center of Embodied Spectrum pre-dates the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by 100 years. By the standards of a human lifespan, these are distant events. In the span of the earth’s history, they occur in a single epoch, a short period of drastic acceleration in both the productive and destructive capacities of humankind.

Embodied Spectrum begins with a singular moment of an individual life and expands out to consider the history of nations, the half-lives of nuclear fallout, and the deep time of the sun’s energy. In the process, the work considers the weight of history on our most intimate relationships and the need to grapple with the human capacity for both creation and destruction.

Kei Ito
Born 1991, Tokyo, Japan
Based in Baltimore, MD

Kei Ito is an interdisciplinary artist whose work utilizes the conceptual framework of photography to visualize the invisible. As a third-generation atomic bomb victim living in the US, Ito employs his generational history as a series of case studies that often applies the language of monuments and memorials. Ito’s work initiates a journey of healing and growth while honoring the memories of those lost to both historical and contemporary tragedies.

Ito’s solo and group exhibitions have been reviewed in the Washington Post Magazine, Hyperallergic, BBC Culture & Art, BmoreArt, ArtMaze Magazine, ESSE Magazine and various newspapers worldwide. His works are included in major institutional collections, such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL), the Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach, FL), the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art (Fort Collins, CO), En Foco (NYC, NY), the Eskenazi Museum of Art (Bloomington, IN), and the Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA). Ito received his BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology followed by his MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art.

Kei Ito: Embodied Spectrum takes place as part of MoCA Arlington’s SOLOS 2025, part of the Museum’s long-running SOLOS exhibition program. Launched in 1988, SOLOS features solo exhibitions by artists based in the Mid-Atlantic region who are working at the forefront of contemporary art.

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