Takashi Ishida – Beyond the Garden

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present “Beyond the Garden,” a solo exhibition of works by Takashi Ishida. In this exhibition, which marks Ishida’s first solo presentation in four years at the gallery, the time and experience of engaging with film and painting, painting and sculpture, sculpture and film as continuously pursued throughout the artist’s practice, is explored by means of a new spatial composition.

In 2019, at the Aomori Contemporary Art Center covered deep in snow, Ishida created countless sculptures by using a fretsaw to cut out shapes from 4:3 MDF panels in an improvisational fashion. The installation presented in this exhibition which projected various manners of light, was an experience the artist himself describes as being reminiscent of Nijinsky’s choreography for Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” For his project this spring at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishida created an animation work that incorporated the place and time of production while once again engaging in the creation of sculptures. The work “Small Blue House,” conceived during the exhibition, was assembled according to the size of the museum’s glass exhibition galleries filled with natural light referred to as “light courts.” Such had been an attempt to once again incorporate the experience of time generated by the object itself into the two-dimensional context of film and painting that Ishida has long continued to pursue.

“There is a Feijoa tree in the garden. While it was small at first, it soon grew into a large and magnificent tree. I had always sensed quadrangular and circular shapes from this tree. A branch that unexpectedly extended from trunk near the ground appeared to constantly support the movement of these shapes in a well-balanced manner.

One day, for a new project, I placed a panel on the wall and set up my camera as usual. A few days had passed since I started to paint something while being guided by the light, at which point I found myself placing other things on the floor rather than the painting. Eventually, this became a tree. The influence from the outside, or the painting that ended up not being painted, had rendered the room a part of the garden.

During this process that unfolded over the course of two years, the cherished branch of the tree in the garden had been cut by accident. Incidentally however, by this time a small house with square windows had been conceived near the new tree in the room. That which is outside emerges in the room, followed by the emergence of a small room within it. This fugue and repetition, which seemingly have slight rifts in time, appears to extend inwards and at the same time continues beyond the garden”. Takashi Ishida (excerpt from the artist’s notes)

While the new work presented in the exhibition has been conceived in a space with a square window likewise to “Burning Chair” (2013), “Square Window” (2015), “Where Light Falls” (2015) and “Between Tableau and Window” (2018), the experience of engaging with planes and three-dimension, paintings and sculptures, images and objects, is expressed with unprecedented density and new techniques. The events repeated within a single room and the transformation of space is a further development of the unnatural drifting back and forth between the light from the skylights and artificial light from the square window, as well as themes such as walls and paintings. The artist also describes the work as being conceived due to the sudden generation of, or impulse to generate a tree that ordinarily belongs outdoors, within interior space.

Takashi Ishida is a painter and film artist born in 1972 in Tokyo. He is also a professor at Tama Art University. He uses a technique of drawing animation, which consists in drawing lines and shooting them one frame at a time. By interposing multiplying lines, moving points or some other mobile element, Ishida’s installations produce changes in the quality of the space.

Gallery hours Tue-Sat 12 am – 6 pm

The gallery will implement necessary measures to prevent coronavirus infections.

Exhibition Duration 15.10.- 12.11.2022

www.takaishiigallery.com

Location:
Taka Ishii Gallery
complex665 3F, 6-5-24 Roppongi, Minato-ku
106-0032 Tokyo
Japan