Threshold- installations by Amy M. Ho and Kana Tanaka

Description

“Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being…. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man.” 1.

Threshold opens August 1, 2014 at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary. In this exhibition, space and light are amplified and perfectly balanced in the sensibilities of artists Amy M. Ho and Kana Tanaka. Building on the experiential work of such artists as James Turrell and Robert Irwin, both Ho and Tanaka push at the boundaries of physical and psychological space within the limited scale of the gallery.

Ho’s installation in the front gallery space is a departure from her usual process of projecting enlarged images of the small maquettes that she builds. The resulting effect might illuminate a wall or ceiling with the illusion of stairways, doors and similar architectural structures that do not otherwise exist, and the experience is one of being physically present within a chimera, inhabiting the imaginary.
In this installation, the original design for the maquette is built to life-size. Rectangular frames recede inside one another in alternating black and white, generating an optical effect of infinite space visible from both the exterior and interior of the gallery simultaneously.

In a second installation by Ho, a projected piece in an adjoining room sends the viewer through a door to the unknown. In her exaggeration of architecture, Ho is interested in the subtle effects of a given space on the psyche and how re-imagined spaces might bring the viewer into a deeper awareness of this relationship.

Tanaka has created installations in galleries as well as numerous public art works that suspend crystalline glass forms and reflect ambient and natural light. Echoing phenomena such as rain, snow, ice, condensation, and falling or floating leaves, her installations bring the soothing, meditative quality of being outside, inside.

Opposite Ho’s work, Tanaka’s installation of suspended glass droplets and orbs cascade gently from the other side of the gallery. The fragility and close proximity of glass objects in a state of frozen free fall generate a sensation the artist calls a ‘trigger moment’, a heightened awareness of the body moving through space.

Tanaka is drawn to working with glass because it is a very challenging medium. “It’s important to make mistakes as you work with it…the material often leads to something unexpected,” she says. Though a given piece may have a repetitive form, individually each element is embedded with the folds and scars of an organic process.

1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

-Essay by Claudia Tennyson

More Info

Link

http://www.chandracerritocontemporary.com