Louise Noguchi

Louise Noguchi (born 1958) is a multidisciplinary visual artist in Toronto who for five decades has used video, photography, sculpture, and installation to examine notions 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 the 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. In 1999, she co-authored Compilation Portraits - Louise Noguchi with Kym Pruesse and Suzanne Luke (Robert Langen Gallery). 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. (Crack and her other videos have been shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario).

More recently, she has looked to contemporary culture as a source for material, including her background as a Japanese descendant. In the following years, she examined Japanese Canadian history, as in 2025, when she did The Shape of Loss, a co-created, live installation during the all-night Nuit Blanche festival at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre Gallery, Toronto. Part of it as well as a time-lapse video of her performance remained in the gallery until the show closed in 2026. and at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and the Thames Art Gallery (2008).

In 2024, the two-person show Louise Lawler Louise Noguchi was shown at the Beauty Supply Room in Toronto, curated by Kate Whiteway. In 2024 as well, the exhibition Louise Noguchi: Selected Works 1986-2000 opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario. It included three works from her career: Crack, a video showing flowers demolished by a whip; Fruits of Belief: The Grand Landscape, an installation that merged sculpture and photography; and Eden, a sculpture made using a mirror. In 2025, her exhibition The Shape of Loss was shown at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre Gallery in Toronto.

She has participated in group shows since 1978 and been in exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Gallery and the Canadian Embassy Gallery, Vancouver (1996); the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, Japan (1996); with Stan Douglas in the Space of Making, Berlin (2005), and in the United States (2009). In 2020, she was in a group show titled Next Year's Country, linked with artists as seemingly distant as William Kurelek at Remai Modern, Saskatoon.

Selected solo exhibitions prior to 2000 Source: Carmen Lamanna Gallery (1982), Toronto, Canada. ’’Extensions of the Heart’’ (1984), Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto, Canada; ’’We Draw to Kill the Beasts’’ (1985), Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto, Canada; Carmen Lamanna Gallery (1986), Toronto, Canada; Carmen Lamanna Gallery (1987), Toronto, Canada; ’’Out of the Garden...Into the Forest’’ (1989), Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto, Canada; ’’Louise Noguchi: Selected Work 1982-1985’’' (1989), The Power Plant Gallery, Toronto, Canada; Southern Albert Art Gallery (1990), Lethbridge, Canada; Stride Gallery, Calgary (1990); Forest City, London (1992); Optica, Montréal (1993); Cold City, Toronto (1993); L.A. (Industrial Arts) (1993); Compilation Portraits, Cold City Gallery, Toronto (1995); CEPA Underground (1997) (inaugural exhibition), Buffalo, USA Modus Operandi (2 person exhibition with Ginette Legaré) (1999).

Selected group exhibitions Source: Tributes and Tributaries 1971-1989 (2016–2017), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON; Next Year's Country (2020), rRemai Modern, Saskatoon, SK; The Return (2023), Ace Hotel Toronto, Toronto, ON; Louise Lawler, Louise Noguchi: Beauty Supply Room (2023), Beauty Supply, Toronto, ON;

Public collections Noguchi's work is in the public collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston; the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa; and elsewhere. She is represented by Birch Contemporary Gallery in Toronto.

Teaching She was a professor in the Art and Art History Program, a collaborative joint program between the University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College where she taught photography and performance-based art from 1971 on.