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Organized by Wonder Site Director Yusaku Imamura, "ritual" featured the work of three emerging Japanese artists, Mamoru Tsukada, Satoshi Ohno and Masaya Chiba. Ohno and Chiba presented works in mixed media, while Tsukada presented two framed color photographic prints as well as a serial piece comprised of several uniformly sized and framed photographs.
Prior to entering the primary exhibition space, one first encountered two relatively large-scale color photographs by Tsukada. Each image existed as an enigma: one in blue, white and black, the other in red, yellow, orange, black and white, each framed in white with a second frame, a substantial white border of photo paper, also framing each image. Both images were thoroughly saturated to the point that each became an abstraction of light, clearly defined shape and color -- though each image appeared clearly rooted in representational space.
Following this initial, disorienting impression, the viewer passed naturally into the primary gallery space, where a series of paintings by Chiba as well as a sketchbook were on view. Chiba's paintings were installed in a relatively straightforward manner, though the sketchbook literally hung from the ceiling, floating in a space accessible for touching and viewing by visitors. Chiba's works depicted a variety of crudely painted, exotic landscapes in which a totemic figure or figures featured prominently: a literally primitive representation of an imagined space. Also present within the gallery space were two major works by Ohno, a scattershot installation featuring a large geometric work on paper mirrored by an installation of colored acrylic placed directly on the gallery floor. These were accompanied by a photograph and several paintings -- essentially one large series of abstractions generated from representational source material. Also on view was a grand work on a series of canvas panels. The painting, with imagery of dissolving forms in acid colors, was activated by the dialogue between straightforward painting and entropic installation.
At the end of a lengthy hall, in the passage leading towards a second exhibition space, one found a small-scale canvas by Ohno on which the themes of the larger works was concentrated. However, a prominently placed set of hot-pink daubs painted along metal piping within the hall served as a reminder that the processes referred to in the paintings extended beyond the discrete canvas.
The final room in the gallery contained a series of sculptural paintings by Chiba, stacked on the wall salon-style. The canvases were pierced, rather crudely, with wooden sticks, a sculptural intervention which suggested that Chiba, too, may desire his paintings to be read as prompts for action beyond the space of representation.
Upon exiting the gallery, and re-viewing the now seemingly well-ordered photographs of Tsukada, one was led by a spiral staircase to another, second-floor exhibition space in which hung additional works by Tsukada -- a set of milk-white, sharply outlined yet ultimately blurred and unreadable images. Each image appeared to be of-the-same "something," but exactly what this "something" might be, was assertively unclear. Ultimately re-disorienting, the images hinged upon the power of contradiction; order and uniformity served to enhance a sense of non-understanding as one viewed again and again and again... the "same" incomprehensible image.
That Tsukada's series should serve to close the exhibition is apt -- for what is "ritual" if not the activation of an unknown within the everyday, achieved, in part, through a process of repetition?
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