Takashi Ishida, Beyond the Garden, installation view at Taka Ishii Gallery, Oct 15 – Nov 12, 2022. Photo: Kenji Takahashi
Takashi Ishida
Beyond the Garden
Oct 15 - Nov 12, 2022 Taka Ishii Gallery
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.
Takashi Ishida, Beyond the Garden, installation view at Taka Ishii Gallery, Oct 15 – Nov 12, 2022. Photo: Kenji Takahashi
“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. His recent major exhibitions include ISHIDA Takashi, Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum (2020); Light on the Arc, the Aomori Contemporary Art Center (2019); Sharjah Biennial 13, Tamawuj (2017); Aichi Triennale 2016 and Kenpoku Art 2016 (both 2016); Billowing Light: ISHIDA Takashi, the Yokohama Museum of Art / the Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum (2015); Dojima River Biennale, Little Water, Osaka (2013); Double Vision: Contemporary Art from Japan, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art / Haifa Museum of Art (2012); MOT Collection Silent Narrator: On Plural Stories [Special Feature] Takashi Ishida, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2011); Artist File 2010: The NACT Annual Show of Contemporary Art, The National Art Center Tokyo (2010); Meditations Biennale, Beyond Meditations, Poznan, Poland (2010). He received the Most Promising Young Talent Prize of the Gotoh Cultural Award in 2007. His work Gestalt won the Award for Excellence at Image Forum Festival 1999.