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Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Visual Art Currently Hanging: Porcelain, Animation, Sound, and Mylar After Japan's Tsunami

Posted by Jen Graves on Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 12:40 PM

Courtesy the artists
Kukai: Sea and Sky at SOIL: Everything shimmers and mutates.

"Ravishing" was the word I had to use the last time I experienced a digital animation rising and setting over a tiny ceramic city in a darkened gallery by the artists Robert Campbell and Yuki Nakamura. That was in 2006, and a new installation based on a similar structure remains beyond the need for or quite the reach of description, especially the way it rolls through time, waves of light patterns passing across faceted and reflecting surfaces in a dazzling stream of constant change.

But certain pieces of information open up new associations. The artists live across Puget Sound from each other, on facing rocks: Campbell on Vashon Island and Nakamura (who is originally from Japan) in Old Town Tacoma. Their mutual view is like an infinite mirrored regress. The artists have written that since the tsunami hit Japan, when they look out at the ships and detritus drifting between them, they can't help but think about bits and pieces of people's homes—which are, in fact, making their way toward the American West Coast.