My latest Critic's Pick from Tokyo is up on ARTFORUM website. Given the circumstances, for all of you who cannot see the exhibition in person, I am also attaching a selection of the installation views. All images courtesy of the gallery—Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo.
Jack McLean and Peter Star
Beatriz Inglessis with the show's curator Shai Ohayon
Jack McLean's "Salt Mine" is the inaugural show in Tokyo's newest gallery—"The Container." As promised, the visitors found themselves entering an actual shipping container reassembled inside a hip hair salon located in the hip Nakameguro district. The container, painted in white and stenciled on the outside, provided a perfect space for an assemblage of anthropomorphic wooden planks that were sporting various anatomical fragments and fashion accessories. Inside The Container, the angry, happy, scared, frustrated and surprised planks arranged in groups of two or three mimicked the mimicked the less dramatic groupings that made up the opening crowd. A definite must-see.
The show is on view through May 23. Curated by Shai Ohayon.
Roentgenwerke AG will be showing new works by Motohiro Tomii. Reception for the artist will be held March 4th, 6-8pm. The show will be on through February 26th.
If you have not seen the WAKUWAKU SHIBUYA at the Tokyo Wonder Site yet this is your last chance. The TWS is holding their closing event on Sunday, February 13. Click here for more details.
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
Mayumi Terada, Door and hanger 1002 / 2010, 25x40x15cm. Image courtesy of the gallery.
Tokio Out of Place gallery's new exhibition, curated by the New York-based curator Mako Wakasa, is a group show of four photographers: Gail Albert Halaban, Lisa Kereszi, Mayumi Terada and Shellburne Thurber. Although very different in style, all the works reference the concept of interiors, real or metaphorical.
Halaban's city interiors, shot from outside and framed by apartment windows, provide a fishbowl view of New Yorkers' daily lives. Because these are posed, Halaban's specific interiors, just like Terada's symbolic ones function, first of all, metaphorically. They represent settings for interior-appropriate action, prescribed and already known. Halaban populates her settings with human actors while Terada depopulates hers, reducing them to the poetic glow of silver gelatin prints. This existential dichotomy is fully realized in the only non-photographic object in the show—Terada's installation Door and hanger 1002 (2010)—a box with a peephole on one end and a miniature door on the other. As one looks through the peephole, the knowable interior of the box becomes, right before one's eye(s), a versatile interior.
Although Kereszi's photographs of the remnants of the US Coast Guard housing ostensibly deal with interiors as well, the abstracted images of what signifies human dwellings (phones, window frames) function first and foremost as motifs.
Shellburne Thurber, Andover, MA: Office with chartreuse analyst’s chair, 2000 Chromogenic print 30 x 30 inches (76.2 x 76.2 cm), edition 1/25. Image courtesy of the gallery. The fourth artist featured in the show, Shellburne Thurber, is represented with her series of New England's psychoanalysts' offices. Ranging in decor but all similarly perfect and inviting, these über interiors exist to eradicate the problems inevitably generated in the process of occupying real interiors: the kind reconstructed by Halaban, reduced to their essence by Terada and used as motifs by Kereszi. Curiously, Thurber's interiors, by the virtue of being both real and metaphorical, connect the works of the three other artists in the show just as they highlight the paradoxical nature of its concept. The show is on through November 20. 
Untitled, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 73.6 x 58.4cm. Image courtesy of the gallery.
Last Sunday Misako & Rosen opened a new exhibition of Nathan Hylden's work. This is his sophomore show at the gallery, the last one dating all the way back to 2007. The seven paintings on view (four acrylics and silkscreen on aluminum, and three acrylics on canvas) help to trace the artist's preoccupation with the processes and the effects of pigment application. The regular grid of silkscreen dots enhances the lightness inherent in aluminum, making the works hover above the surface of the wall. In contrast, the paintings on canvas absorb the light, bringing forth the materiality of the texture of the support.
Just a few paces away from Yuka Contemporary, the Hiromart Gallery is showing abstract paper collages by Croatian-born, New-York based artist Zdravko Toic. The works of view reference surrealist and constructivist vocabularies, reviving the spirit of mid-career Wilfredo Lam and early Naum Gabo. The cut paper portions compete with the inked cores of the work.
The exhibition will run through November 14.
