EUKARYOTE
EUKARYOTE is pleased to announce an exhibition entitled “para nature” which features the work of four artists from Friday November 2nd to Sunday November 25.
A universal theme in fine arts is that of the confrontation with ‘nature’, including the original true nature of us humans. Our activities, which are focused on something that surpasses human scale, maintain a distance and dignity against ‘nature’ while possibly showing us a new concept.
We will exhibit both new and more recent artwork by four artists, starting with ABE Yu-ki winner of the Excellence Award at the 2011 New Cosmos of Photography competition and whose photographs follow the traces of human activities, from the past to the present, on the basis of landscapes. ARAKI Miyu draws the eye with artwork that features many holes bored into a stone and she continues to push the boundaries of stone carving while moving from place to place. KOROMO Shinichiro is exhibiting the fruits of his labors which were the result of his artist residence at Arts Maebashi last year, and draws scenes with an everyday affection from the perspective of a bird’s eye view. HATAYAMA Taishi is currently exhibiting at the Sezon Museum of Modern Art, and has a style that searches again and again for the feel of the brush on the outside of human perception area with a clue of light.
Furthermore, as a partner of this project, we are grateful for the help of YOSHIMURA Shin an art critic who is enrolled on a Doctoral Program, with a specialist subject of art history, at Waseda University.
Monday
2018.11.2(fri)18:00〜20:00
＜Partner＞
Shin YOSHIMURA
＜Lighting Design＞
Keita Ito
＜Graphic Design＞
Minori Asada
Timothy Morton said, “Nature wavers in between the divine and the material”. In relation to human society since the modern era, nature – its existence which arises regardless of human hands – is being riven in two by its use as a mere resource for manufacturing and as a target of mostly religious adoration. Romanticism pursues a unity with God within a noble landscape that overpowers human perception, and this natural beauty is deemed to be a reflection of humanity’s geometrical spirit (Pascal). As a result of two trends of thoughts regarding fine art, rationalism has become subordinate to materialism in a form that is fit-for-purpose. Today’s consumer society is an artificially built urban environment with fragments of rationalistically ordered nature – in which case can we really say that the illusion of a romanticism style landscape is really desirable? Morton asserts that we must set free the concept of ‘nature’ in order to think of the real ecological symbiosis between human society, and the global environment.
However, ‘nature’ in reality has, I think, just changed into pieces which have become controlled raw materials on one hand, and a global environment with simplistic images of nobility on the other. Rather, ‘bountiful nature’ appeals to us, both in the past and now, and entangles us, and as for the global environment itself, it can be thought of as a force that opens up as yet unknown landscapes. Nature, even if it is separated, it is also one thing, neither of which dominates the other, but while there is intimacy it is also full of conflict. Let us try calling this “para nature”, a landscape and thing which is born from the connection between nature and artificiality, between the earth and people. This may depict a distorted vision and it may also hint at a possibility of symbiosis. In this group exhibition, four artists will express with their own sense of distance an artificial ‘=art’ that invites something different, something that is at times from nature, while copying nature, and being close to nature, and will perhaps show us a very different landscape.
YOSHIMURA Shin
EUKARYOTE is an art space which has been established in Jingumae, Tokyo, in 2018. Within the concept of something more than an occurrence of art, there is an ever spinning contemporary coin of tangibility and intangibility, and it is this essence, this universal value held by artworks and artists, which is actively accepted but left behind.
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