Miwa Yanagi ARTFORUM review
My review of Miwa Yanagi’s recent “Lullaby” exhibition at the Rat Hole Gallery is now out in the May issue of Artforum.
Erika Verzutti "Chopping Board"
Sheep, 2010, pen and acrylic on board, 21x29cm
This was the artist’s first solo exhibition at Misako & Rosen, who showed her last year along with another Brazilian artist—Tiago Carneiro da Cunha. Verzutti’s latest work is done in the spirit of inter-media experimentation. She explores familiar surfaces and unfamiliar pigments and, as she put it, “flirt(s) with painting” in her frameless drawings made on wood panels. The result is very interesting, as the works on view appear both spontaneous and carefully executed. There are only two sculptures in the show, just enough to remind of Verzutti’s roots in three-dimensional work, yet, her sculpting impulse is amply expressed through gauging and carving of wooden boards. She is sensitive to every little marking in their surface, sometimes drawing our attention to these by outlining them in ink or matt acrylic. And while Verzutti’s whimsical animals have little in common with Yukihiro Taguchi’s performative installations (see the entry below), both artists seem to be led by the materials they use, capitalizing on the potential of domestic objects, be it discarded furniture or chopping boards purchased in Tokyu Hands.
Gallery αM: "Complex Circuit" Vol. 1. by Yukihiro Taguchi
Contact Zone by Yukihiro Taguchi: installation view, main gallery
Last Saturday Gallery aαM inaugurated the first in the series of six shows united under the name of “Complex Circuit.” The first artist is Yukihiro Taguchi, a Geidai graduate based in Berlin. Taguchi describes his work as performative installation. This exhibition consists of an installation of (locally) found objects, a video set up of a stop-frame animation showing the assemblage process, and several projectors that allow to generate shadows that are, perhaps, the main subject of the show. During my visit to the gallery the artist, along with several friends and assistants, held a circle performance, very much in he spirit of Fluxus.
The performative aspect is crucial to the project: Taguchi will keep rearranging the environment for the duration of the show. His other recent work involves experimentation with various materials including a collaborative fabric installation with the fashion designer Vladimir Karaleev (Fabric/k, 2008), a deconstructed performative installation of floor boards fitted in and around a building in Berlin (Moment, 2007), and another one produced out of air ducts (Nest, 2008). I found his approach very “constructivist,” it seems to me that Taguchi’s work is driven, to a large degree, by materials. When compared with the recent projects from Berlin, this installation strikes as precise and gritty at once reflecting the clash of intricate optics and humble salvaged objects that are made to coexist in the same space.
John Warwicker "for john cage (la mer)—the Floating World"
Installation view, wall drawing , 7-9 April 2010. This drawing is generated by tracing the movement of the visitors during the installation process.
John Warwicker, a known as a typographer/graphic designer is holding his first painting show at the G/P Gallery (NADiff location, 2nd floor). There were six groups of works ranging from a live wall-size drawing he performed during the installation (it transcribed the movement of the people around the gallery), to the digital prints of punctuation marks in Wittgenstein’s “Tractus Logico-Philosophicus.” Some pieces reference John Cage’s “La mer,” Kurosawa’s and Truffaut’s films and actual geographical locations—all are graphic notations of sounds and movement. A beautiful and coherent installation made specifically for this gallery, a “must see,” in my my opinion.
Recent Openings: Hiromi Yoshii Gallery
Enlightenment, Last Café, installation shot, image courtesy of Hiromi Yoshii gallery
Last Friday Hiromi Yoshii Gallery inaugurated an interesting group show. Aya Ohki’s and Shinya Inoue’s powerful and yet visually restrained works make a nice contrast with Enlightenment’s Last Café installation (part of his AD 2010 show). The artist’s spacial games continue the tradition of Op Art, but present them in the context of a larger installation installation. Of course, the cafe theme is a new twist on a old theme of actual dining tables that relate to the mega-famous painted one on the back wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie refectory in Milan.
The other small room had Shinya Inoue’s video installations “Rotating ballpoint pen dance” (2008), “Moving Moon (2010), and “Jupiter, Venus and Crescent (2009).
Recent Openings: Kodama & Nanzuka Underground
Tatjana Doll photographed with
SPEED_Shinkansen Bullet Train 2011
enamel, acrylic,
2m x 30m (10 pieces), 2008
Image courtesy of Nanzuka Underground
The new exhibitions in Kodama Gallery and Nanzuka Underground Gallery (both in the Shirokane Art Complex) serendipitously, address speed and movement, but do so in different ways.
Kodama presents a collection of video/sonic work by a Kyoto-based artist Akira Miyanaga. The main gallery contains an installation in which the two larger walls combine projections from six smaller wall segments. The video appears to be shot from a left-side window of a moving car, and the projection on the large walls in oriented clockwise. This naturally aligned direction is contradicted by the counter-clockwise movement on the smaller walls, so that the overall effect is at once enveloping and disorienting. The viewer can sense the speed, but the reverse movement on the smaller walls suppresses the sensation of movement and the viewer is suspended in the midst of streetlights and neon that illuminate city night. The purposefully exposed projector cords continue the theme of road construction, part of the cityscape in the video.
Akira Miyanaga, “about the lights of land”, 2010, 8 channel video projection, 5 minutes loop
One floor above, in the Nanzuka Underground Gallery, the German artist Tatjana Doll is making her Tokyo debut. This show consists of several enamel on canvas paintings and two videos. Doll’s two-dimensional works convey the sensation of speed through the combination of large scale and angularity. The cars she paints seem to come alive—the doors of the Lamborgini stretching up and out like giant bat wings. The only painting in the show containing a human figure Rip Stealing Beauty (2009), reflects the movement and the angularity of the car representations that surround it. Doll’s nod to Japan’s contribution to the discourse of speed is the representation of Shinkansen bullet train shown in the gallery as a video.
ARTFORUM Critics’ Picks: Ohad Matalon
An Unseen Land or It Is All Gone In Reality, 2009-2010, Negative/Positive Still Projection, Dimension: variable
This post has nothing to do with Tokyo, but, on my recent visit to Tel Aviv I saw a very interesting show by the photographer Ohad Matalon and decided to write about it. My review of this show had just come out in Artforum’s Critics’ Picks. For more of Matalon’s work click here.
