Cerith Wyn Evans (1958-) is a conceptual artist based in London whom produces installations and sculptures through the use of mixed media in the manner of neon, steel, text, photographs, and sound. His poetic and elegant works appeal strongly to the vision, presenting a unique perspective on the human senses and system of perception in response to existences and concepts that are both intangible and autonomous - embers and light, fragments of novels and poetry, time and space.
a.k.a (2015) is a work that appropriates obsidian, a substance used from medieval times in the creation of Scrying mirrors. Faces reflected on the polished surface are faintly distorted as a consequence of the subtle irregularities of the stone. Through citing contexts of astrology and rituals that remain inherent within the material, a new relationship between the stone and the viewers is conceived.
Helen Mirra (1970-) is an artist who lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In an intention to explore the daily relationships between nature and the people that inhabit it, Mirra creates works in the form of sound, film, photography, fabric, text, and installations that respectively reference a wide range of concerns from history, science, and aesthetics.
The exhibited works Mittel (2006) and Emerson (2006) were created in Berlin during Mirra’s participation in the artist-in residence program supported by DAAD. Mirra had resided in a studio located next to the forest area of Grunewald that extends to the west of Berlin. These sculptural works are produced through combining, scrap materials from pallets that the artist gathered from the street in front of her studio, and the pinecones found in the forest. Mirra’s manual method of production represents her political conscience, and the works conceived in this manner constantly display the presence of materials obvious in origin within the contours of their form. Such materials also serve as criterions for decisions made by the artist during the process of production. The appearance of the original material is altered, decontextualized, and is lead to harbor an abstract and poetic quality.
Koji Enokura (1942-1995) was a painter and installation artist who received high international acclaim for his participation in the Paris Biennale in 1971 and the Venice Biennale in 1978. Enokura’s practice had studied the tension that emerges when the human body confronts natural objects such as soil, stone and wood, and industrial materials of heavy oil and glass within a given space, and further sought to explore the interdependent relationship between space and such elements. Enokura is often recognized as a member of the ‘Mono-ha,’ yet strictly speaking does not belong to this movement. Through engaging in a dialogue with the material, Enokura had attempted to release physical matter into a context of a mutual relationship with mundane space. Amidst the tension that occurs in the distance between the artist and the overall condition of matter conceived through such aforementioned means, Enokura’s theme had been to re-contextualize all material things from their primordial source.
Since the late 1980s Enokura has produced two-dimensional works that appropriate canvas and cotton fabric as their support medium, staining them in oil and acrylic. In addition, Enokura has taken documentary photographs of his installations, drawing significant influence from Provoke, a photography collective of the same era. Enokura also achieves to liberate the finder from the intentions of the photographing individual within the medium of photography, consistently maintaining his concept of releasing the shutter amidst a moment of tension between the self and the subject captured through the camera.
Since studying under conceptual photographer Kenneth Josephson, Kunié Sugiura (1942-) has produced an array of works through the adoption of various techniques in photography. Sugiura’s oeuvre comprising of color photographs, works created through the combined application of the photograph and acrylic on canvas, and photograms conceived by motifs in everyday life, respectively serve as a continuous exploration of the relationship between photography and other media, and seek to question the ‘object’ and its abstraction as captured within the context of the photographic image. Influences from traditional Japanese aesthetics such as notions of ephemerality and transience also appear to resonate within Sugiura’s works. The images depicted in Tree Trunk Bark 3 (1971) and Small Ivy (1969), are fixed through direct application and exposure of photographic emulsion on canvas.
Noboru Takayama (1944-) is an installation artist who creates works that appropriate materials of firm substantiality including old and worn-out railway sleepers, iron, and wax. This three dim ensional work consisting of four “railroad ties,” is part of an installation presented in the 1969 exhibition, Underground Zoo.
Railroad ties have served as Takayama’s most prominent motif. The artist began producing such work as a requiescat towards the countless lives lost amidst the establishment of Japan’s railway during the history of its invasion of Asia, in rail operations through coalmine tunnels, and in the nation’s drive towards modernization. The work constructs a space that closely connects the object and memory. Although Takayama is often considered to be an artist belonging to the Mono-ha due to railroad ties being the material of choice within his works, his activities had attempted to explore a different subject as dealt with in the concerns of the Mono-ha. As opposed to Mono-ha artists whom had presented the space or circumstance in which an ‘object’ exists through the displaying of untreated ‘objects,’ Takayama had created works that focused on a specific material and the relationship between the history and memory that is engraved within it.
In parallel to his three-dimensional works, Takayama has also produced a series of drawings. In Emerge of Memories (1981) the artist uses the technique of sprinkling graphite on to a sheet of paper covered in a solvent that contains an adhesive. Takayama however, does not concern himself with a standard process of drawing that constitutes determining the composition in advance. Rather, akin to the sensitivities of ‘Sho [calligraphy]’ (a formative art of the Far East that pursues beauty through handwritten text. In this context refers to characters written on Japanese paper with brush and ink), he senses the atmosphere and presence of a particular place, and produces his works as performance drawings in an intention to create works that embody the very moment in which his own mind and body enter into the space.