16th September - 14th October 2000
Shigemori Residence, Kyoto
Courtesy: Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
Installation view
Blue Memory For more installation views click
During his first trip to Japan, Gabriel Orozco travelled through the agricultural landscape. Much of the farm land is protected by semi-transparent, blue plastic netting which envelops and parcels it, creating in the artist's words 'artificial blue farms'.Orozco's project is to hang a sheet of this blue-grid netting between the garden and the main room. The material will be installed at the outside level of the veranda in the form of blinds. In the summer, bamboo blinds are often hung from the veranda's of traditional Japanese houses to provide shade inside.
'Blue Memory' operates as a screen between garden and room, inviting reflection on the garden as an image. In traditional houses when the shoji screens are withdrawn, the garden is contemplated in a seated position from inside the room as a tableau or 'living picture'.
Through Orozco's intervention the image of the garden will be framed and divided into segments by the grids of the blue blinds. The de-construction of the garden image into grid sections recalls the rational process of structuring the image found within Western painting and also within modern technology, for instance digitized photography.
By placing the blue screen between garden and room, Orozco superimposes another layer of representation over the framed image of the garden, capturing nature as a distant memory.
Like many of his other sculptures, interventions and photographs, Orozco's screen mediates complex spatial and conceptual relationships with a poetic deftness and subtle precision. In doing so, it engenders reflection upon relationships that are implicit within the constellation of garden and house, including relationships between inside and outside space, garden and architecture, frame and framlessness.
At the same time by deploying an artificial material that is used to control nature, Orozco's intervention draws upon wider relationships found within the world at large: the dialectic between culture and nature, landscape and technology, city and countryside.
Seminar
lecturers : Philippe Nys (philosopher)
Daniel McClean (independent curator)
moderator: Mitsuaki Shigemori (artist, shima co-curator)17th September 2000 2 pm - 5 pm
Villa Kujoyama
17-22 Ebisudanicho Hinooka Yamashinaku Kyoto
Tel. +81 (0)75 752 7171The intention of the seminar is to consider some of the many implications raised by the Japanese landscape garden as architecture and microcosmos. The seminar considers 'Shima' as a series of parallel investigations, focusing particularly on the contribution of Gabriel Orozco. Potential subjects for discussion include: artificial nature (the garden as artifice and model), in-betweeness (between garden and architecture, inside and outside space), micro/macro (the garden as microcosmos), framelessness (order and contingency within the garden) and life/locus in Art (wholeness and the implicate order).
Mirei Shigemori Residence
34 Kamiojicho, Yoshida Sakyoku, Kyoto 606-8312, Japan
Fax +81 (0)75 761 8776 E-mail shima753@hotmail.com
Due to limited access by appointment onlywith the kind support of Marian Goodman Gallery, Institut Franco-Japonais du Kansai,
Japan Arts Fund, The 23rd Japan Inter-Design Forum 2000 Kyoto and Shiseido
home | site | project | seminar | association | map | contact |
