Showing posts with label Super Window Project. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Super Window Project. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
"Salaryman/Superman" at Tana the Bookshelf Gallery
LG Williams, Salaryman/Superman, 2011, installation view
Tana's director Tamura Masamichi
Baron Osuna (Super Window Project) with the artist
Baron Osuna and Tamura Masamichi
Still independent curator Shai Ohayon and Beatriz Inglessis
The SHIBUHOUSE gang
Monday, November 29, 2010
CLOSED By LG Williams / Estate Of LG WilliamsAt Super Window Project, Kyoto, Japan: Starts November 19th
LG Williams, Closed (Super Project Window) 2010, 48 x 64, Vinyl and Engineer Grade Reflective Sheeting on Heavy-Duty Aluminum, Edition of 10
Where:_ | Super Window Project, Kyoto, Japan |
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Monday, September 20, 2010
Kyoto: Bouke de Vries "PIECES"
Bouke de Vries, Pieces, 2010, detail
Glass, mirrors, variable dimensions, image courtesy of the gallery
Kyoto’s Super Window Project & Gallery is temporarily pausing its activities at their Motoyama Kamigama location to concentrate on various international endeavors (starting with the gallery presenting their artists at Artissima 17). In anticipation of this seasonal closing, the SWP has mounted their last exhibition entitled “Pieces” by Bouke de Vries.
The current installation is comprised of two tall thin glass towers filled with glass fragments at once fragile and dangerous. The resulting tension between power and vulnerability is not unlike what I saw in the last SWP exhibition of Soshi Matsunobe’s paper sculptures: ostensibly hard but, in reality, super delicate works. The metaphor of vulnerability is physically manifested in the glass of De Vries’ ephemeral towers due to the timing of the installation. The exhibition was inaugurated on the anniversary of the World Trade Centre disaster, making the semi-transparent glass shard-filled structures function symbolically as well as viscerally.
Unlike the accumulation sculptures of the New Realists, De Vries’ piled up fragments of ceramics and discarded or found materials are not a commentary on the production-accumulation continuum within modern societies. His boxed “life fragments” seem to refer to the condition of fragility of human existence—what was once real becomes an emblematic representation removed from its original context, and forced into the vacuum of glass encasement. In De Vries, the materials that used to form the fabric of peoples’ lives now exist only as fragments, “pieces” which encapsulate the memories of things past.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Kyoto: Super Window Project
This and the following few posts should have come out weeks ago, after my recent trip to Kyoto in early July, but were set aside because I was on a deadline for the last round of corrections on my book, and had to handle the usual end of the term papers/exams/grading routines. I am done with both now and will take the next couple of weeks to catch up with my postings.
Soshi Matsunobe, installation view at the Super Window Project gallery. Image courtesy of the gallery.
The Super Window Project in Kyoto has two simultaneous exhibitions at two different venues. The main gallery houses an installation by a young neo-minimalist artist Soshi Matsunobe whose works could serve as illustrations for Donald Judd's definition of sculpture as "specific objects in literal space." Matsunobe's sculptures are made of paper and covered with geometric linear overdrawing in black ink—most of it parallel lines placed at regular intervals. The objects are stacked in various configurations in or around large plywood shelflike display case, with few elongated pieces leaned against the wall and the largest work placed directly on the floor. The arrangement is very precise, in part, because of the optical interaction between the black-on-white linework and the matte black walls of the gallery. Still, Baron Osuna, who curated the show, avoided any semblance of decorativeness, as he allowed the objects to dominate the space and not be subsumed into the larger design scheme.
Takashi Suzuki, "Bau" series (100 photographs), 2009, C-print on wood. 8,5 x 11cm. Edition of 3 + 2 AP.Courtesy Super Window Project, Kyoto. ©2009-2010 Takashi Suzuki.
The second Super Window Project exhibition is at a different location in downtown Kyoto. It showcases the latest work of photographer Takashi Suzuki, a Kyoto-based artist who trained in Boston and Dusseldorf. The photographs are mounted on wood, and, just like Matsunobe's paper sculptures have a have a distinct "object" feel to them, but one's perception of the artwork is quite different if the images are seen before the mounted photos. I first encountered these photographs projected on a screen during an artist talk event held at the gallery on July 4, which made me to conceptualize the works in much more formal terms. At the time, Suzuki presented this latest works as an investigation of architecture through photography. The cycle, entitled Bau, shows constructions made of household sponges stacked to imitate architectural shapes. Because the photographs are taken from a 45 degree angle the constructions look almost monumental despite the humble nature of the material that composes them. This re-assignation of meaning reflects Suzuki's intention to examine how the viewers gather and process visual information, and to understand the mechanisms behind visual cognition. By defamiliarizing the object (sponges), the artist denies their primary function in order to create a new paradigm in which lasting and disposable collide.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Art Fair Tokyo vs. KOH-JUTSU
Art Fair Tokyo, Contemporary Art section
The 2010 Art Fair Tokyo was inaugurated last Thursday at the Tokyo International Forum. Most of the exhibitors were located in one of the large halls, with some of the younger galleries and media stalls situated in two separate sections, in the upstairs lobby. The fair covered a whole range of media (modern and contemporary two and three-dimensional works, video, Chinese and Japanese pottery, Nihonga artifacts, ukiyo-e prints, etc.) and time periods (from 12th century onwards). While the bulk of the participants came from Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama and Kyoto, there was also a sprinkling of galleries from places like Canada, China, Germany, Korea, Spain, even Russia. The majority of the booths were fairly conventional, but the upstairs lobby "Projects" section had some very interesting displays: Yokohama's Gallery Simon arranged a dramatically lit space to showcase the works of Kouji Ohno (Storage Element, 2010), Kyoto's Super Window Project TM & Gallery had Morgan Tschiember's installation Solid Geometry (2009). The temporal and geographic diversity of the art fair played both ways: while it was fascinating to see the older paintings and artifacts, the sensory overload made it difficult to appreciate many of the contemporary works.
KOH-JUTSU installation view. Works by Satoshi Uchiumi, Akiko & Masako Takada and Yoshihiko Satoh
The Art Fair Tokyo had closed yesterday, but the other seasonal show, a much smaller one, is still on across town, at Omotesando's Spiral. The KOH-JUTSU exhibition organizer Röntgenwerke AG did not take part in the Art Fair Tokyo. Instead, together with Gallery Koyanagi and Gallery Kogure it put together a selection of works by their artists in the generously-sized first floor gallery of the Spiral Hall. The exhibition is curated by Tsutomu Ikeuchi. Röntgenwerke gallery's choice not to exhibit at this year's Art Fair Tokyo, instead organizing a concurrent show in a venue other than their flagship space in Bakurocho seems like a bit of a rebellion against the necessary uniformity of the large fair. Of the other two participants in the Spiral show Gallery Koyanagi did take part in the Art Fair but had a super-minimal and, perhaps because of that, the most stunning display. I wonder if the single flower sculpture by Yoshihiro Suda was also a way of resisting the store-front model of the Fair.
Yoshihiro Suda at Gallery Koyanagi booth, Tokyo Art Fair
The Koh-Jutsu show will run though this Wednesday, April 7th, admission is free.
