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Straits Times
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Explore the idea of home with 160km of red cord in artist Chiharu Shiota's Boston show
Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota's new exhibition, Home Less Home, at ICA Watershed is her largest museum show in the United States. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Explore the idea of home with 160km of red cord in artist Chiharu Shiota's Boston show BOSTON – Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota has drawn a simple shape in thin air and at monumental scale: a rectangle with a pitched roof, instantly recognisable as the universal symbol of home. This ethereal installation is made of polyester cord – some 21,000 lengths of it, streaming down 7m from the ceiling of the ICA Watershed, a massive exhibition space at an active shipyard in east Boston. A rectangular forest of blood-red cords hangs nearly to the floor of this former factory space. Inside, the cords shift to lengths of black that form a dark silhouette of a house. Visible within this mirage-like structure are antique furnishings – a four-poster bed, rocking chair, dinette set, sewing table and chair – with a spectacular flock of paper of some 6,000 sheets fluttering above the domestic tableau. Shiota's new commission, titled Home Less Home, opened on May 22 under the banner of the inaugural citywide Boston Public Art Triennial and will remain till Sept 1. Artist Chiharu Shiota's Home Less Home exhibition at ICA Watershed. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES 'The house shape looks like a shadow because home does not exist,' Shiota said in a recent interview at the Watershed as she reached among the cords to affix the final pieces of paper with a stapler. 'Home is like something in your heart, inside,' added the soft-spoken artist, 53, who grew up in Osaka, Japan, and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1997. Her immigrant story, both personal and age-old, echoes those of many residents living in east Boston near the shipyard, once the second-largest point of immigration in the United States, after Ellis Island. Earlier this spring, the ICA distributed a flier asking the local community to consider Shiota's open-ended questions of 'what home means, what it feels like to leave home and what it takes to rebuild it'. The Home Less Home exhibition includes the personal stories, photographs, drawings and documents of members of the local community in Boston. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Their personal stories, photographs, drawings and documents were reproduced on the sheets of white paper animating her installation. For almost three decades, the artist has created haunting, visceral environments using vast webs and fields of her signature cords – she calls them 'threads' – entwined with accumulations of well-worn objects, such as shoes or beds, that evoke both human presence and absence. At the Venice Biennale in Italy in 2015, Shiota transformed the Japanese Pavilion with an atmospheric matrix of red thread embedded with thousands of collected keys raining down into wooden row boats – objects poetically summoning ideas of entry, exit, passage and afterlife. A mid-career retrospective that opened at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2019, The Soul Trembles, has toured places such as Busan, South Korea; Shanghai and Shenzhen, China ; Jakarta, Indonesia; Brisbane, Australia; and most recently Paris – with an accompanying monograph published this spring by Skira. The show travels next to Italy and Canada. Mori Art Museum director Mami Kataoka, who organised the retrospective, said via e-mail that she has been astonished by visitor numbers worldwide that have far exceeded each institution's expectations. 'Beyond cultural differences, this response underscores the universality of the themes in Chiharu's work,' Ms Kataoka wrote, including 'our shared fear about an uncertain future and our common quest to understand the meaning of life and what may lie beyond it'. Artist Chiharu Shiota often uses networks of wool thread, a medium she feels better conjures the intangible tangles of emotions and invisible connections among people. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Shiota left her home in Japan with just one suitcase to study abroad, eventually finding her way to Berlin. She trained as an abstract painter, but early on shifted to 'painting in the air' – as she called it – using networks of wool thread, a medium she felt better conjured the intangible tangles of emotions and invisible connections among people. 'Many times, I'm using red string, the colour of blood,' she said, symbolic of 'family, nation, religion and survival'. In Berlin, a city she found weighted with history and inspiring to her artwork, Shiota met her husband and raised their daughter, who is now 18. 'Now, I have the feeling I have two home countries,' said the artist, who often collects discarded suitcases and other commonplace items at Berlin flea markets for her installations. Pieces of vintage leather luggage are part of the exhibition, Home Less Home. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES For the exhibition at the ICA Watershed, Shiota's largest museum show in the US, she has also adapted her 2014 piece, Accumulation – Searching For The Destination, near the entrance as part of her reflection on home. Thirty pieces of vintage leather luggage dangling inside another shower of red threads lead viewers into the show. Some of the suitcases have an internal motor, making them bob as if adrift at sea. 'Each person, one suitcase – they're ready to go, but we don't know where,' said Shiota, who will have solo shows in New York at the Japan Society and Templon gallery later in 2025. Ms Ruth Erickson, chief curator at the ICA, said: 'Chiharu is incredible at picking these objects that feel like they have this lifetime of wear and use and memory in them, that can be a kind of surrogate for a human story.' She invited Shiota to make the site-specific installation for the cavernous Watershed space, calling her 'an artist who understands how to work at a scale that can be a real challenge'. Home Less Home comprises around 160km of cord. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Home Less Home comprises around 160km of cord . Walking the processional length of the installation, a visitor experiences it perceptually dissolving into singular threads up close, while in longer views, it coalesces into a majestic volume. Shiota has created a winding pathway through the heart of her project, and viewers can see at close range what is printed on the fluttering sheets of paper. There are photographs of airport reunions, children playing on lawns, a Venezuelan's first experience of snow in Boston. One person offered a recipe for apple dumplings. A child's drawing of a house includes the handwritten line: 'Home is all the important people who makes the life better.' A woman contributed her falsified adoption papers deeming her an orphan, with the accompanying message: 'May all Korean adoptees find their way back home.' Personal photographs of community members are part of the exhibition. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES While none of Shiota's work is overtly political, 'this idea of where one makes one's home, and what the connections are to a place, could never be more at the forefront of our minds', Ms Erickson said. 'We see a country and an administration really analysing those rights.' Against the backdrop of court cases and debates raging in the news cycle about the fate of immigrants, who often are portrayed as a faceless monolith, the testimonies in Home Less Home are acute in their individuality. Sifting through these collected stories, they touched Shiota like a chorus of voices. 'I never met this person,' she said, 'but I feel like I know this person.' NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Forbes
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Jeffrey Gibson At The Broad: The Mix That Is His Art And His Life
Installation view of entrance to Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me, at The Broad Museum, Los Angeles, May 10 to September 28, 2025. Photo by Joshua White/ courtesy of The Broad Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place at me at The Broad Museum through September 28, 2025. is the culmination of many firsts: In 2024, Gibson was the first indigenous American to represent the U.S. as a solo artist at the Venice Biennale. The Broad exhibition, which brings the Venice exhibition to Los Angeles, reconfiguring and adding to it, is also Gibson's first solo Southern California museum exhibition. Gibson's work offers up a joyous explosion of color mixed in masterful patterns that incorporate indigenous craftwork and traditions as well as text and titles resonant of US history and American pop culture. More specifically, Gibson's wild mix of colors in bold repeating geometric patterns recalls Vasarely-like OpArt, while the distinctive text in his works appear like the font from 1960s psychedelic rock posters. The works appear in a multiplicity of forms: From large paintings, which have hand sewn elements and elaborate beaded frames, to beaded multi-media busts and full length figures, as well as beaded multicolored birds. An existing sculpture by another artist has been recontextualized for this exhibition. There is even a multi-media video and music installation that brings the club to the museum and is sure to make you want to dance. Installation view of Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me at The Broad, Los Angeles, May 10 to September 28, 2025. Photo by Joshua White/ courtesy of The Broad Gibson takes his titles from resonant pop cultural phrases, such as the lyric, 'Birds Flying High You Know How I Feel,' from the Newman/Bricusse song Feeling Good, made famous by Nina Simone. Some of the titles have a resonance with American history, from the iconic 'We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident,' to Congressman' Emmanuel's Celler's invocation to his colleagues about the Civil Rights Act, 'Action Now. Action Is Eloquence,' and a quote from a letter: 'The Returned Male Student Far Too Frequently Goes Back To The Reservation and Falls Into The Old Custom of Letting His Hair Grow Long,' regarding those schools to which Indigenous children were sent to erase their culture, and assimilate in ways that, 'Kill the Indian to Save the Man.' Jeffrey Gibson Image by Brian Barlow Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio Gibson sees himself primarily as 'a collage artist,' which, while not doing justice to the power of his paintings, sculptures and installations, is a fair way of describing Gibson's life and the mix that is his art. Gibson was born in Colorado Springs, of parents of Cherokee and Choctaw heritage who themselves were separated from their families and sent to the boarding schools that sought to 'normalize' indigenous children. His father was a civil engineer for the US Department of Defense, and the family lived for periods in West Germany, South Korea, as well as in North Carolina and New Jersey. Gibson reflected that he was raised 'in a very racially mixed culture.' It was in Germany on school field trips that he first visited Dachau and learned about the Holocaust. And then moved to New Jersey where he lived in primarily an Italian and Jewish neighborhood. Gibson felt that he understood that 'my story, my family and myself, wasn't actually as different from these other stories as we might learn them in school.' In the 1990s, Gibson attended the School of Art Institute of Chicago, from which he received his BFA in 1995. Gibson was interested in studying the work and legacies of Indigenous American Artists, but his teachers did not have many such artists to recommend to him. Gibson admits that he 'felt very unsatisfied' by his art education. Installation view of Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me at The Broad, Los Angeles, May 10 to September 28, 2025. Photo by Joshua White/ courtesy of The Broad Gibson met artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and worked at the Field Museum on the very beginnings of The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which introduced Gibson to an expansive way of looking at objects that included spirituality, history, ancestry, and even ideas of what was animate versus inanimate. 'That made it difficult to go back and just make art in the way that we might know it,' Gibson said. In 1998, he received his Master of Fine Arts from the Royal College of Art in London. For many years early in his career, Gibson struggled to find his voice and mode of expression. The turning point was when Gibson learned about the Museum of Modern Art's 1941 exhibition, Indian Art of the United States, curated by Frederic Huntington Douglas of the Denver Art Museum and Rene d 'Harnoncourt, director of the Indian Crafts Board. Gibson researched the exhibition in the archives of the Denver Art Museum and MoMA. To Gibson, that exhibition became a challenge 'to pick up that unfinished thread and try to continue making something from it.' At the press preview, Gibson said, 'I realized, wow, I get to be the steward to make people aware of the diversity of Native America. And that became a responsibility to do it with a degree of ethics, but also in, in conversation with native communities. But, really, we still have yet to scratch the surface of how diverse Native American [Art] really is. ' Other artists have found the burden of representation crushing or limiting but Gibson saw it as artistic real estate that wasn't being used, and that was his to claim. Gibson's work is a vibrant expression whose subject matter is less about how the Native American population was murdered and their culture disappeared, but more a celebration of how they lived, their knowledge, their traditions, their crafts. In this way, Indigenous knowledge remains a living thing. 'I think what I do attempts to be more reflective of the world we live in' Gibson said. 'I'm continually surprised why that's even a challenge for people to understand.' However, Gibson very much believes that in depicting the specific, one arrives at the universal. 'I'm telling my story, which is kind of a collaged hybrid narrative of how I became who I'm today. But I truly believe that [everyone] has their own version of that…What I know best is my story, but I also have to trust that my story is reflective of some version of everyone else's story.' In her opening comments at the press preview, Joanne Heyler, founding director and president of the Broad, said, 'The works in the show resist the erasure and marginalization of indigenous and many other communities by being irresistibly joyous [in ways that] I would argue induce endorphins.' Some critics have rejected Gibson's work as too colorful or his mix of colors as being too garish. I can only analogize this wrongheaded critique to calling any individual Gay person too flamboyant. It misses the point (and is besides the point). The colors are Gibson's alphabet, his language, his culture (as a gay, indigenous, American artist), and his mix requires mastery to work. Gibson shared with me that he has learned so much about color over his decades of experience that in his studio, he has to create a system of painted pieces of paper to catalogue the colors for which there is no name. Installation view of "The Dying Indian," at Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me at the Broad Museum, Los Angeles, May 10 to September 28, 2025. Photo by Joshua White/ courtesy of The Broad Beyond the paintings and beaded busts and birds, I want to single out two works. The first, which was not part of the Venice installation, is a monumental bronze sculpture made at the turn of the 20th century by Charles Carey Ramsey, titled The Dying Indian, which belongs to a tradition of works that seemed to speak to a level of nobility among the vanquished Native Americans. With the emphasis of vanquished, or as the title indicates, dying. Gibson's simple yet moving intervention was to commission beaded moccasins by the Nee Cree artist, John Little Sun, which bear the words of Roberta Flack's lyric, 'I'm Gonna Run with Every Minute I Can Borrow' which when placed on Indigenous warrior's of the sculptures feet, add a whole new dimension of compassion and caring to the work. To that point, at the opening press preview Joan Hyler commented: 'Jeffrey's work tells us how beauty and cultural traditions comprise some of the strongest survival tools for combating oppression.' Installation view of Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me at The Broad, Los Angeles, May 10 to September 28, 2025. Photo by Joshua White/ courtesy of The Broad The other work that stands very much as a statement of Gibson's world view is his work, We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident, in which Gibson has transformed a punching bag that hangs from the ceiling, whose top half has beaded color patterns and the famous words from the Declaration of Independence while the bottom half has s series of skirts that go the floor and splay out in a circle. This works speaks very much to Gibson's worldview that while we may live through difficult times (and be a punching bag during them), we absorb those blows, and continue living our lives in all their collaged beauty. Or as Gibson told me, 'Times of war, times of extreme violence and inequity have happened throughout history. Even before there were non-North American indigenous people on this land, there was violence on this continent. In many ways it's a part of human nature and it is painful.' 'The more I ponder those moments in history and the moments that we're currently in,' Gibson said, 'What I think about is our fear and how we handle fear and looking at the circumstances that cause that fear. Even before this moment, we have manufactured a culture that produces anxiety… [and] a sense of instability. And in moments like this, that instability can be amplified through the media in a very easy way. ' Let me give the last word to Gibson, who told me, 'If we forget how phenomenal we are as living, engaged, imperfect beings, — that's what really marries me to craft in the way that we make things in the studio. '
Sydney Morning Herald
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
If it was up to this artist, all his creations would be Untitled
Very often, says Cerith Wyn Evans, exhibitions of his work – whether that work is a box of photographs or the huge, spiky webs of neon lights he is showing in Sydney - are shaped principally by the spaces where they are shown. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, he is particularly excited by the prospect of opening all the windows onto Circular Quay. Light will pour in, along with the sounds of the harbour. 'We are opening up the entire façade!' he enthuses. 'And because it is right on the quay, there are thousands of tourists walking up and down, boats coming and going, really a hustle and bustle outside which is extremely vital – and very unlike a museum.' Wyn Evans, 67, has represented Wales at the Venice Biennale, exhibited all over the world and is represented by galleries in seven cities, but this is his first solo show in Australia. His earliest works were in experimental film; he says he regarded them as essentially sculptures, but he has always played fast and loose with disciplinary categories. He also has a magpie's eye for influences and quotations. Having grown up speaking Welsh, he is particularly interested in forms of language reflecting specialist uses, from Morse code to dance notation, which frequently appear in his work. But he is seemingly curious about almost everything. In a single sentence, he touches on Chinese medicine, yoga, mathematics and optics. 'What I'm attempting to do is run all of that through a scrambling mill,' he says. 'If we somehow feed them all through each other, we arrive at something that is a kind of form.' This exhibition, mostly drawn from his own collection, focuses on his big neon works made over the last 10 years. Wyn Evans isn't worried about the neon being drained by all that daylight. 'It lessens the impact, which is what I'm looking for. We're not making a sci-fi movie with futuristic neons,' he says. 'It's about looking at light. To me, there is nothing more beautiful than seeing a neon in blazing white sunshine. It's so compromised it becomes almost tender: it becomes more poetic, becomes broken somehow as a force for consumerism or legibility.' I'm in want of a better word to overcome latent blockages, that broad dissatisfaction that I'm unable to express what I want to say. The first neon signs, he says, were made as advertising. 'But artists have been working with neon since the 1930s. Then, with pop art and conceptualism, a lot of artists tried to popularise their materials so they were not working with bronze or marble, expensive rare materials, in order to somehow attach that value to the sculpted object.' Wyn Evans himself worked initially in film, he has said elsewhere, because it provided an escape route from that hierarchy of materials. In recent times, he has been making mobiles with broken car windows from wrecking yards: materials that cost nothing, but that allude both to the cracked The Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp – one of his artistic beacons – and to the daily disaster of the smashed mobile phone, a real-world reference. 'We're all dealing with these sorts of screens; we're all confronting this the entire time.' There are plenty of scrambled signifiers everywhere in the exhibition, in fact, with Noh theatre as a dominant theme. Wyn Evans first went to Japan 37 years ago as a visiting professor at Kyushu University in the country's subtropical south, a tough area known for its mining and steel industries – Richard Serra, he says, has his works cast in its huge foundries – as well as palm trees and spectacularly fresh sushi. He loved it. 'It became urgent to me that whatever I did on this trip to Japan, I got to secure my next trip. And it's been like this ever since. I spend two months a year there.' During that time, he might see three Noh performances a week. For an experimental artist, Noh's prescribed rhythms and gestures are surely an ostensibly incongruous passion? 'It's not, actually,' he says. 'The aleatory aspects of Noh are vast. Nothing is rehearsed. There are no lighting cues. It's a bit like a marathon; there is an elasticity to it.' He glows as he recounts a visit to a Noh school where the master's 106-year-old mother not only made sweets but danced for the visitors. 'She's extraordinary, about this tall' – very small – 'bent over double, you have to fight off the tears, you know.' It should be added that today, as usual, he is wearing Japanese traditional dress: a snow-white kimono and trousers. Old ladies in the supermarket often ask him about it, he says. 'I say it's my workwear.' The titles of his work point towards this source of inspiration, among others, but the works themselves don't spell it out; if someone looks up Noh on the internet and ends up watching a snippet of this ancient, precise and poetic blend of theatre and dance, that would be 'absolutely great'. If not, fine. 'I don't think Cerith is a didactic artist in the slightest,' says curator Lara Strongman. 'I don't think he's thinking this is my meaning and here you are. I think he's the opposite of that, that he argues for slippage, for mutability, for the different possibilities coming in from different people, much as the work manifests the idea of fragments of things taken from here and there.' Everything slants Japanese, however, in the exhibition's design. Stepping stones like those found in traditional gardens lead the viewer, providing different angles and points of view on the works. 'You have to position yourself here, then there, to take another step,' says Strongman. 'It's a way of really grounding yourself, this sense of thinking about your own passage through time and space as you walk.' Following the path, the works loom in your way. 'So you have to stop and think about them. You get a real sense of your own bodily presence; you can see through the works to other works and your view is changing the whole time. You're aware of yourself in a way we often aren't, because we're mediating our lives through a tiny screen.' The materials may be obviously industrial but, she says, 'it's the most analogue exhibition I've ever worked on. It's a show that asks you to spend some human time with it.' Loading Words, whether it be a wall full of Marcel Proust's work rendered in Japanese or one of his elaborately flourished titles, are ostensibly central to this work. Wyn Evans particularly loves a homonym; one show he did in Britain was called Cite/Sight/Site. 'They sound the same, but you can prise them open to find a myriad of associations and construct this little model where you create these interstitial spaces between' – he fishes for two sufficiently disparate elements – 'a quote from Elizabeth Bishop and the plan of the Alhambra.' He says he thinks of language and communication as distinct materials, on a par with light, air and time, even suggesting as a title for this piece 'For want of a better word' to represent the way he chews over them. 'I'm forever, in a sense, converting thoughts into language, but I'm in want of a better word to overcome latent blockages, that broad dissatisfaction that I'm unable to express what I want to say.' Loading It is thus not entirely surprising when he says he would prefer not to have any titles at all. 'Whatever doesn't embarrass me kind of gets through but, if it were up to me, I would call everything Untitled.' He feels no obligation to explain himself. 'They can buy you that red herring space in order to come in with something from underneath,' he says. 'But there is a certain resistance in the work also. I don't lose sleep over people not understanding it. Children are perfectly happy running around, just enjoying the awe of it. And I try not to be judgmental or to take it personally if people don't like it. Why should I play by someone else's rules? I'm not a politician, after all. I'm an artist.'
The Age
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
If it was up to this artist, all his creations would be Untitled
Very often, says Cerith Wyn Evans, exhibitions of his work – whether that work is a box of photographs or the huge, spiky webs of neon lights he is showing in Sydney - are shaped principally by the spaces where they are shown. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, he is particularly excited by the prospect of opening all the windows onto Circular Quay. Light will pour in, along with the sounds of the harbour. 'We are opening up the entire façade!' he enthuses. 'And because it is right on the quay, there are thousands of tourists walking up and down, boats coming and going, really a hustle and bustle outside which is extremely vital – and very unlike a museum.' Wyn Evans, 67, has represented Wales at the Venice Biennale, exhibited all over the world and is represented by galleries in seven cities, but this is his first solo show in Australia. His earliest works were in experimental film; he says he regarded them as essentially sculptures, but he has always played fast and loose with disciplinary categories. He also has a magpie's eye for influences and quotations. Having grown up speaking Welsh, he is particularly interested in forms of language reflecting specialist uses, from Morse code to dance notation, which frequently appear in his work. But he is seemingly curious about almost everything. In a single sentence, he touches on Chinese medicine, yoga, mathematics and optics. 'What I'm attempting to do is run all of that through a scrambling mill,' he says. 'If we somehow feed them all through each other, we arrive at something that is a kind of form.' This exhibition, mostly drawn from his own collection, focuses on his big neon works made over the last 10 years. Wyn Evans isn't worried about the neon being drained by all that daylight. 'It lessens the impact, which is what I'm looking for. We're not making a sci-fi movie with futuristic neons,' he says. 'It's about looking at light. To me, there is nothing more beautiful than seeing a neon in blazing white sunshine. It's so compromised it becomes almost tender: it becomes more poetic, becomes broken somehow as a force for consumerism or legibility.' I'm in want of a better word to overcome latent blockages, that broad dissatisfaction that I'm unable to express what I want to say. The first neon signs, he says, were made as advertising. 'But artists have been working with neon since the 1930s. Then, with pop art and conceptualism, a lot of artists tried to popularise their materials so they were not working with bronze or marble, expensive rare materials, in order to somehow attach that value to the sculpted object.' Wyn Evans himself worked initially in film, he has said elsewhere, because it provided an escape route from that hierarchy of materials. In recent times, he has been making mobiles with broken car windows from wrecking yards: materials that cost nothing, but that allude both to the cracked The Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp – one of his artistic beacons – and to the daily disaster of the smashed mobile phone, a real-world reference. 'We're all dealing with these sorts of screens; we're all confronting this the entire time.' There are plenty of scrambled signifiers everywhere in the exhibition, in fact, with Noh theatre as a dominant theme. Wyn Evans first went to Japan 37 years ago as a visiting professor at Kyushu University in the country's subtropical south, a tough area known for its mining and steel industries – Richard Serra, he says, has his works cast in its huge foundries – as well as palm trees and spectacularly fresh sushi. He loved it. 'It became urgent to me that whatever I did on this trip to Japan, I got to secure my next trip. And it's been like this ever since. I spend two months a year there.' During that time, he might see three Noh performances a week. For an experimental artist, Noh's prescribed rhythms and gestures are surely an ostensibly incongruous passion? 'It's not, actually,' he says. 'The aleatory aspects of Noh are vast. Nothing is rehearsed. There are no lighting cues. It's a bit like a marathon; there is an elasticity to it.' He glows as he recounts a visit to a Noh school where the master's 106-year-old mother not only made sweets but danced for the visitors. 'She's extraordinary, about this tall' – very small – 'bent over double, you have to fight off the tears, you know.' It should be added that today, as usual, he is wearing Japanese traditional dress: a snow-white kimono and trousers. Old ladies in the supermarket often ask him about it, he says. 'I say it's my workwear.' The titles of his work point towards this source of inspiration, among others, but the works themselves don't spell it out; if someone looks up Noh on the internet and ends up watching a snippet of this ancient, precise and poetic blend of theatre and dance, that would be 'absolutely great'. If not, fine. 'I don't think Cerith is a didactic artist in the slightest,' says curator Lara Strongman. 'I don't think he's thinking this is my meaning and here you are. I think he's the opposite of that, that he argues for slippage, for mutability, for the different possibilities coming in from different people, much as the work manifests the idea of fragments of things taken from here and there.' Everything slants Japanese, however, in the exhibition's design. Stepping stones like those found in traditional gardens lead the viewer, providing different angles and points of view on the works. 'You have to position yourself here, then there, to take another step,' says Strongman. 'It's a way of really grounding yourself, this sense of thinking about your own passage through time and space as you walk.' Following the path, the works loom in your way. 'So you have to stop and think about them. You get a real sense of your own bodily presence; you can see through the works to other works and your view is changing the whole time. You're aware of yourself in a way we often aren't, because we're mediating our lives through a tiny screen.' The materials may be obviously industrial but, she says, 'it's the most analogue exhibition I've ever worked on. It's a show that asks you to spend some human time with it.' Loading Words, whether it be a wall full of Marcel Proust's work rendered in Japanese or one of his elaborately flourished titles, are ostensibly central to this work. Wyn Evans particularly loves a homonym; one show he did in Britain was called Cite/Sight/Site. 'They sound the same, but you can prise them open to find a myriad of associations and construct this little model where you create these interstitial spaces between' – he fishes for two sufficiently disparate elements – 'a quote from Elizabeth Bishop and the plan of the Alhambra.' He says he thinks of language and communication as distinct materials, on a par with light, air and time, even suggesting as a title for this piece 'For want of a better word' to represent the way he chews over them. 'I'm forever, in a sense, converting thoughts into language, but I'm in want of a better word to overcome latent blockages, that broad dissatisfaction that I'm unable to express what I want to say.' Loading It is thus not entirely surprising when he says he would prefer not to have any titles at all. 'Whatever doesn't embarrass me kind of gets through but, if it were up to me, I would call everything Untitled.' He feels no obligation to explain himself. 'They can buy you that red herring space in order to come in with something from underneath,' he says. 'But there is a certain resistance in the work also. I don't lose sleep over people not understanding it. Children are perfectly happy running around, just enjoying the awe of it. And I try not to be judgmental or to take it personally if people don't like it. Why should I play by someone else's rules? I'm not a politician, after all. I'm an artist.'
Scoop
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Fiona Pardington Reveals Exhibition Concept Going To Venice Biennale
Aotearoa New Zealand artist, Dr Fiona Pardington (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Mamoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Clan Cameron of Erracht), announces her 2026 Venice Biennale exhibition: Taharaki Skyside. Her major new work for Venice builds on the content of her 2024 series Te taha o te rangi, 'the edge of the heavens' which consists of photographs of Aotearoa New Zealand birds preserved as taxidermy specimens in museum collections. Applying the precision, care and responsiveness to historical and cultural resonances she has previously brought to taonga, Pardington's remarkable avian portraits engage with the tradition of memento mori. By resurrecting their dignity, charisma and wildness, Pardington also brings these long-dead birds vividly to life. Taharaki Skyside makes direct connection with the realm where birds act as messengers between the mortal and spiritual worlds, she says. 'Birds can symbolize familial love, romantic attachment, ecological warnings, they can be intimations of mortality, and in my work they can also represent individual people in my life. The ideas I am conjuring remind us of the integral significance of manu within te ao Māori – as sources of food and materials, and intermediaries between human and divine worlds,' says Pardington. 'Taxidermy occupies a unique space between love, death, and fetish. When photographing in museum collections, I have observed the artifice of the birds' presentation, the way they have been posed, the care with which they have been assembled, and, sometimes, their worn condition. By using strategic lighting and angles I am trying to draw out their charisma – to free them from the constraints of being mere objects,' she says. Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū is Creative New Zealand's delivery partner for 2026, and Pardington's Venice project is curated by Chloe Cull and Felicity Milburn. Throughout her practice, Pardington has drawn acclaim for images that invite us to see and feel the world in a new way, says Milburn. 'Her works for Taharaki Skyside carry vital relevance in a global context. Her images underscore the far-reaching and devastating losses – ecological and cultural – that have occurred as the result of human impact and colonisation.' 'She opens up moments of extraordinary resonance and recognition that transcend time and place, life and death,' Milburn says. Taharaki Skyside opens at La Biennale di Venezia on 9 May 2026. Bio notes: Artist Dr Fiona Pardington is responsible for some of the most memorable images in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand artmaking. For more than three decades, she has crafted a highly respected practice nationally and internationally, operating largely within the tradition of the photographic still life. Pardington often works with museum collections, highlighting the vital cultural and spiritual significance of taonga and natural history specimens for Māori. Pardington has been the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the Moët et Chandon Fellowship (1991–2), the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship (1996–7) and the Ngāi Tahu residency at the University of Otago Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka (2006). In 2011 Pardington became a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate, and in 2016 was named a Knight (Chevalier) in the Order of Arts and Letters (Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Prime Minister, the first New Zealand visual artist ever to receive this honour. In 2017, Pardington was made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to photography. Pardington's works have been extensively collected by all of Aotearoa New Zealand's major public galleries, as well as the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, US), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Victoria.
