Something To Remember You By marksthe first major solo show for artist Motohiro Takeda (b. 1982, Hamamatsu, Japan). Tucked away in Alison Bradley Projects’ eighth-floor gallery space on West 26th Street, the quiet, pensive exhibitionis a testament to the value of close looking and lengthy contemplation. On view until November 2nd, the show presents pieces across various media by the artist, who uses almost entirely found and re-purposed materials.
Takeda works with the goal of bringing humans closer to their immediate environments, evoking intimate dialogues with the most basic cycles of materials in an increasingly oversaturated digital age. The minimal and snug gallery space initiates a narrowing of the viewer’s vision, a shrinking of spatial scale. The artworks themselves do much more: at first, second, and even third glance, Untitled (Spear) looks exactly like a long, thin tree trunk mounted vertically in the middle of the room. In fact, this piece is a concrete cast of a tree trunk found on a forest floor, and it has been burned by fire fuelled by the original tree. Using Japanese wood-burning techniques (shou sugi ban or yakisugi), Takeda creates a closed system of organic and inorganic materials, manually guiding life into death and back again.
