ANOMALY

Art Collaboration Kyoto 2023

Gallery Collaboration
ANOMALY (Tokyo), Fitzpatrick Gallery (Paris), ROH (Jakarta)
Booth: C03

ANOMALY (Tokyo), Fitzpatrick Gallery (Paris), and ROH (Jakarta) are pleased to participate in ACK 2023, with a group presentation bringing works by Noe Aoki, Yusuke Asai, Takuro Tamayama, Louis Eisner, Hannah Weinberger, Cooper Jacoby, Syaiful Aulia Garibaldi, Maruto, and Dusadee Huntrakul.

Presented for their collective capacity to evoke a set of organisms specific to the living and working environments of each of the artists, this group exhibition focuses on the sensory and participatory potential of elements in their borderline between the individual and the common. Whether in the sculptural work of Aoki, who has been developing an experimental expression with iron to question its sensory components (its heaviness, its hardness), or in the immersive environments of Garibaldi and Maruto, each of these works questions itself within the context from which it was produced, shaped, to the space in which it is presented. This reflection on the habitat encourages conscious reasoning about what grows, what is touched, and the elements that work against them. Like a perpetual encounter between that which is alive and that which destroys it, Jacoby’s works are constructed as architectures of urgency, whose attraction works in its repulsive capacity in relation to the spectator, who is as much a factor in its triggering. By evolving around these pieces, each individual is reminded of their masses in a given context, whose links and structures, conceived as threads, are light and fragile. From the creation of participatory micro-organisms in Weinberger’s sound installation, to the use of deer blood in Asai’s paintings, collected while accompanying a hunter. Tamayama’s video piece, which invites viewers to a surreal space by using familiar phenomena and found objects, are not so far removed from the paintings of Eisner, whose interest in myth is akin to a dissociation between his memories and his fantasy, in the shaping of characters and landscapes into epics. Or in Huntrakul’s work, that constantly seeks human (and non-human) connections that extend across time to underline the almost archaeological characteristics of the ways in which we observe, produce and make things come to us.

ANOMALY Artist：Noe Aoki

sora no mizu/2008ⅩⅢ-1,2,3 （water in the air/2008ⅩⅢ-1,2,3）, 2008
Iron
Right: H177.73 xΦ71cm / Center: H195.90×φ84cm / Left: H186.49×φ46.3cm

Water has no form.
It is always around me, from liquid to solid to gas.
If I were to create the shape of water in a given moment.
The soft shape of water that is by my side, falling and rising again.

—— Noe Aoki

Ever since she embarked on artistic activity in the 1980s, as material, Aoki was drawn to iron, which exists on earth in greater quantities than water and has been close to humankind since ancient times. She produces works through steady repetition of the simple process of cutting industrial iron plate and sheet into parts that she then assembles by welding them together. Through the agency of her hands, the resulting works are freed from the hard and heavy feeling associated with iron, as well as from the mental equation of sculpture with a material mass, and dramatically alter the space in which they are placed.

ANOMALY Artist：Yusuke Asai

full of Life, 2022
Deer blood (Oshika Peninsula) and indian ink on canvas
H129.5xW97cm

Born in an endless stream, Asai’s primordial motifs encompass images of plants, animals, people, and myth-like entities that appear to be hybrids of plants or animals and human beings, all arrayed side by side, without leaving any gaps of blank surface. Some seem to display an eco-structure by, for example, having smaller plants or animals nested inside larger creatures. They are wrought with an intricacy and complexity that may even surpass the world of real counterparts.

What is intriguing in Asai’s works are their materials. Asai’s use of soil as a material in his works goes back to 2008, when he participated in a group exhibition held in Indonesia and created a mural with local soil and water. As a medium that does not depend on any special art supplies, soil is at everyone’s feet and apt to be overlooked by reason of its ready availability. Asai incorporated it into his works while highlighting its natural features in respects such as color, particle size, and viscosity, which differ with the climate and terrain. In the process, he established a unique style of his own.
In 2019, he accompanied Nozomu Onodera, a deer hunter whom he met at the Reborn-Art Festival, on a hunting expedition on the Oshika Peninsula, and retrieved some blood from wild deer during it then made paintings with the blood.

Asai’s drawings and paintings bring fertile alternative perspectives and new discoveries to our everyday life. Utterly unbridled, his quasi-primitive expression continues to broaden and excite our minds and sensibilities.

ANOMALY Artist：Takuro Tamayama

The Sun, Folded., 2019
Video (Single-channel), 21’2”, in loop
Edition of 5

Takuro Tamayama is an artist who produces sculptures and installations that dissimilate space by using familiar phenomena and found objects.
The Sun, Folded. is a video pice consisted of a furniture-like structure spanning the wall from one end to the other, wallpaper, mirrors, half-mirrors, videos, and spheres look alike lamps suspended from the ceiling. The infinite images are interwoven with the real space and flow into an unreal world.

As part of the ACK Special Program “Ladder Project powered by Daimaru Matsuzakaya”, Tamayama’s newly made installation will also be on view at a venue in the center of Kyoto.
For details of the exhibition and to read the interview text, please visit here (in Japanese only).

To find out more on the Fitzpatrick Gallery’s works, click here, and for ROH’s artists here.

Also Ishu Han (ANOMALY) and Syaiful Aulia Garibaldi (ROH) exhibit works in the ACK’s Public Program “BEYOND GLITCH“.