Ricoh Art Gallery is is pleased to present “Here, No Balloons”, a solo exhibition by Paris-based photographer Yuki Onodera. This exhibition will be displayed on the 8th and 9th floors. The exhibition consists of the new works produced by the photographer using StareReap 2.5D printing and other works selected by Onodera from her past works.
The collaboration between Ricoh and Onodera by StareReap’s print started last year when Onodera saw an exhibition at Ricoh Art Gallery in the fall of 2021. Onodera immediately sensed the purpose of StareReap, a new printing technology, and asked Ricoh engineers one question after another. After a short but intense exchange, Onodera returned to France and began to develop ideas  for a new work in earnest. Even in a situation where it was difficult to travel freely, Onodera and Ricoh held online meetings and exchanged prototype prints to complete a new work by StareReap. 
Regarding the impressive exhibition title, “Here, No Balloons”, the artist herself says:
··········The work in this exhibition combines the gritty, sand-like texture of these dramatically blown-up prints with the liquid layers of the StareReap printer to unique, interdimensional effect. For me, the process was tantamount to recalling and restoring the sculptures in an inversion of their destruction. In a meditation on this motif of “melting,” these digital photographs of an absent melted object were further developed in a molten solution that imbued them with myriad images, as if being overlayed with the weight of the passage of time. In a binary of collision and melding, we have the StareReap’s smooth yet contoured, paint-like color images and modern monochrome prints.
This series of seven life-sized prints lining the panoramic walls of the Ricoh Art Gallery bring part of Paris to Ginza. I hope the aberrant images transplanted onto these prints take viewers on a journey back through the fog of time, place, and image.
In addition to this new work from Here, No Balloon, the exhibition features a number of pieces from an earlier series, Eleventh Finger, created between 2006 and 2014.
Eleventh Finger used a hidden camera to covertly capture the unconscious movements and gestures of subjects. The faces of subjects were obscured by innumerable pieces of paper perforated in lacy patterns that were applied to the photographs through the photogram process. I feel the somewhat comical contrast between the granularity of the gelatin silver prints and the photogram’s planar smoothness resonates complementarily with the new work in Here, No Balloon.··········

StareReap’s seven panoramic new works are based on images taken by Onodera’s first digital camera. She collages gelatin silver prints on canvas as a support and printing images generated by StareReap on it. With this approach, we try to bring out the physical StareReap printing properties. “Here, No Balloons”. Thinking about the theme of the new work, the “melted balloon statue” that disappeared during World War II, is simultaneously imagining the reason why it had to be melted down. There is also The seven prints emphasize the importance of imagination, as they overlap with the world situation that has been intensifying recently.

Excerpts from the press release