Salt and Pepper × gallery commune present
Kovi Konowiecki “and in its place, another”

Supported by Deadbeat Club

Venue: Salt and Pepper 3F
2-5-2 Ebisu Nishi, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo

We are pleased to announce the holding of an exhibition by Los Angeles, California-based photographer Kovi Konowiecki entitled "and in its place, another" at Salt and Pepper in Ebisu.
Kovi, who has an unusual background as a former professional soccer player but has recently won numerous awards, has deeply reexamined the similarities hidden in the photographs he has taken in California, Mexico, Europe, and the Middle East, weaving together works that are woven together with emotion and intuition. We invite you to enjoy a beautiful, one-of-a-kind world that challenges our own preconceptions and pursues visual and conceptual boundaries.

"and in its place, another" was created in a much more casual way than my usual work. Rather than photographing specific places or people, I began by piecing together images I'd taken in places like the Middle East and Mexico, where I'd traveled extensively, with images I'd taken near my home in California. I noticed many similarities among the images I'd taken—composition, shape, texture, and similarities in subject matter—and I kept asking myself if there was something that connected them on a deeper level. The answer always came back to the idea of "borders." However, "borders" are not just a physical concept, but also an abstract, immanent one. I found that there was a strong visual connection between the works that stimulated my ideas about place.

Rather than formally dividing the work into chapters that mark different geographical boundaries, I decided to create one long stream of consciousness driven by emotion and intuition. Despite the political realities present in the region where the work is set, my approach to the work is quite far removed from borders in the political sense. I want the viewer to journey through the work, moving from place to place without knowing where they are or where they are going, while at the same time feeling rooted in a "borderless place." In this sense, there is a strong sense of movement and displacement throughout the work. The idea of a borderland is much bigger than a specific place; it can also be an emotion, an object, or a sensation. It's a place that feels like nowhere but also somewhere.

However, while I began as a project about place, “and in its place, another” evolved into one about emotions and visual associations. There is a constant play of light, shadow, and time that connects the photographs and the various open-ended narratives that accompany them. Throughout the project, people and objects often resemble one another in their shape and composition. At times, elements of particular photographs disappear only to reappear as entirely different figures or shapes, and at other times, objects appear to change slightly or to have completely deteriorated over time. Through these various forms of repetition and experimentation, the project became an exploration of my own visual and conceptual boundaries and a challenge to preconceived notions I had about my work, practice, and relationship to photography.
⁡- Kovi Konowiecki

⁡Kovi Konowiecki | 
Born in Long Beach, California in 1992, he played professional soccer in Europe at a young age before turning to photography. He earned a BA in Media Communications from Wake Forest University and an MA in Photography from the University of the Arts London. He has achieved remarkable success in recent years, winning the Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize in 2016, 2018, and 2019, receiving the Honorable Mention at the Hariban Award in 2020, and being named a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2021. He has exhibited his work in the United States, Portugal, and the UK. In 2018, he founded Mula Press to publish personal projects and special artist editions. His album "and in its place, another" was released by Deadbeat Club in July 2021.
@kovi.konowiecki