Presented by Signature Partner
Mar 26, 2025
Crack
Louise Noguchi performs as an assistant in a wild-west act in a four-video series
Louise Noguchi. Film still from Crack, 2000. Single channel DVD, video projection, colour, sound, Running Time: 3 Minutes. Art Gallery of Ontario. Purchased with financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance program and with the assistance of the E. Wallace Fund, 2004. © Louise Noguchi. 2004/43
For this month’s RBC Art Pick, we’re spotlighting Crack (2000), the first in a four-video series by Japanese Canadian artist Louise Noguchi reverberating with sound – on view now at the AGO as part of the artist’s installation of selected works from the AGO Collection.
Crack (2000) first debuted at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre before being acquired into the AGO Collection in 2004. This installation marks 25 years since its creation and 21 years since it was last exhibited inside the Gallery, where it received acclaim.
A looping three-minute work, Crack, is a part of Noguchi’s video series entitled Language of the Rope (1995-2005), documenting the artist’s education in rodeo arts, including trick-roping, bullwhip cracking, knife throwing and trick riding. Noguchi became intrigued by the art of trick roping by chance from picking up a book. She noticed she had never seen a Japanese trick rope artist and wished to fill that void. She later began studying it with Tom Bishop Junior, a professional rodeo performer – whom she worked with to create Crack (2000).
Filmed as a series of close-up shots, the video opens against pale, calm blue skies. You then see the artist appear in a black Japanese haori (a traditional man’s jacket), performing as an assistant in a wild-west act. Noguchi holds out white flowers, one after another, first a lily, then a hydrangea, then a chrysanthemum (the national flower of Japan), only to have them suddenly cut down mid-air by the brutal loud lash of bull whip. Over and over again, the flowers explode as the three-minute loop repeats.
“Crack,” says Noguchi, “is both a visual and audio experience. The sound of birds calling back and forth mimics the back-and-forth actions of the two performers both on and off-screen. The loudest sound in the video emanates from the crack of a bull whip. You can never see the whip since it moves faster than the speed of sound and slips between the frames of the video, making it invisible to the eye but not the ear.”
For more than five decades, distinguished Toronto artist Louise Noguchi has been working in sculpture, installation, photography, and video. Unifying her work is a conviction that identity is not given—but constructed—shaped by events, beliefs, and circumstance. Born in Toronto in 1958, Noguchi graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1981 and received her MFA from the University of Windsor in 2000. Following her studies, she immediately embarked on her career, working primarily in sculpture, photography, and installation, to global success.
Find Crack (2000) and Noguchi’s other works Fruits of Belief: The Grand Landscape (1986) and Eden (1990-91) on view now on Level 2 of the AGO in the Irving & Sylvia Ungerman (Gallery 230) and Jennings Young Galleries (231, as part of Louise Noguchi: Selected Works, 1986-2000. Curated by the AGO’s Associate Curator of Canadian Art Renée van der Avoird, the exhibition is on view now until July 27, 2025.
