Pretend Not To See

Open Studio Exhibition
12 July - 21 July, 2013 /BankART Studio NYK

Pretend Not to See

The work emerged from commuting between the two locations: the residency studio in BankArt Yokohama, and my home in Tokyo.

I first looked for shadows and reflections, which exist commonly but appear differently in these distant locations. I then became very aware of this sense of what was almost same but not quite translatable, in other words, the untranslatable, from one location to another.

This led me to employ water and light as obscure ‘material’ to recreate this sensation in my artwork. As an attempt to structure the obscure, I used the architecture of the studio as a form of ‘linguistic environment’. For example, by tracing window frames with strings and fabrics, light coming through the window was translated into shades to leave its index as projected shadows onto the walls. The water drawn from the bay outside of BankArt was stored in a rectangular glass tank while I filmed the surface of the bay and projected onto the wall in a similar rectangular shape.

These attempts to capture the intangible material resulted in constructing an installation piece, in which shifting images in similar shape surfaced across the studio environment. The overall artwork became a device to materialize the untranslatable as an opening space into which audiences were invited to see imageries that is almost unnoticeable.

March 2014, Utako Shindo