Kei Ito is a visual artist working primarily with cameraless image making and installation. Ito’s work addresses issues of deep loss and intergenerational connection through the exploration of inherited trauma, passed down from his late grandfather, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Ito utilizes the materiality and experimental processes of photography to make visible the invisible: radiation, life and death, and memory. In a recent body of work, unique, cameraless abstractions can be read simultaneously as the trace of an obliterated body, the bomb falling from the Enola Gay, or as an overhead view of the craters produced by these weapons of mass destruction. These possibilities—the body, the weapon, the results seen from high above—offer three access points for viewers or the confluence of all of them. Powerful to the point of deep sorrow and pain, these haunting images cross time, reflecting both Ito’s fear of and his grandfather’s experiences with the presence of
potential catastrophe. His work meditates on the complexity of his identity and heritage through examining the past and current threats of nuclear disaster and his present status as a US immigrant. His practice utilizes ritualistic image making where each print is a prayer for the future.