Louise Noguchi

Louise Noguch (born 1958) is a multidisciplinary visual artist who uses video, photography, sculpture, and installation to examine ideas of identity, perception and reality.
Early career.
Louise Noguchi was born in Toronto, and received her MFA from the University of Windsor and AOCA from Ontario College of Art in Toronto. She has been active in the Toronto art community since 1981.
Work.
Her sculptural installation work in the 1980s dealt with the theme of the hunter and then by extension, in the 1990s, she explored the language of violence which is concealed in the Wild West mythology of rodeo cowboys, trick roping, sharp shooting, gun spinning and knife throwing. In her video "Crack" (2000), for instance, a cowboy’s bull whip beheads a white flower, with one crack.
More recently, she has looked to contemporary culture as a source for material, including her background as a Japanese descendant. In a series in 2013, Noguchi has taken archival digital prints of the Royal Ontario Museum's collection of Buddha heads that were that were broken or sawed off by thieves and vandals, but had been part of rock walls at various religious sites in China.
Selected exhibitions.
Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally. She has had solo exhibitions at the Power Plant, Toronto (1989), Oakville Galleries, and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston (1999); Birch Contemporary Gallery, Toronto (2005); Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and the Thames Art Gallery (2008) and participated in group shows at the Contemporary Art Gallery and the Canadian Embassy Gallery, Vancouver (1996); the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, Japan (1996); Oakville Galleries, and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa (1997-1999); Deutsches Museum, Munich (2002); ); the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2002 and 2016) (the Art Gallery of Ontario received a large-scale installation from the Canada Council Art Bank in the late 1990s and also put it on exhibition in 2005)., Berlin (2005), and in the United States (2009). In 2020, she was in a group show titled "Next Year's Country" at Remai Modern, Saskatoon.
Public collections.
Noguchi`s work is in the public collection of Oakville Galleries; the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston; the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa; and elsewhere. Louise Noguchi's work is represented by Birch Contemporary Gallery in Toronto.
Teaching.
Since 2001, she has been a professor in the Art and Art History Program, a collaborative joint program between Sheridan Institute and the University of Toronto Mississauga where she teaches photography and performance-based art.