Hitoshi Nomura "Marking Time"
Fergus McCaffrey
This event has ended.
I had already received the opinion that sculptures are things that are supposed to stand firm. That was the conceptual framework through which people traditionally viewed sculpture. And my purpose in presenting Tardiology was to say, “There’s another way.” —Hitoshi Nomura
McCaffrey Fine Art presents Hitoshi Nomura: Marking Time. This is Nomura’s second exhibition at the gallery.
Nomura’s work remains virtually unknown in the United States, yet it represents an unwritten chapter in the rich international dialogue of art after minimalism. His explorations of the interface between man and matter have manifested themselves in photography, film, sculpture, and performance. Since he began his career in 1968, Nomura’s work has defied easy categorization as he has continued to push the accepted boundaries of art, most recently extending his practice into the realms of science and astronomy.
McCaffrey Fine Art’s exhibition begins with the groundbreaking photoworks Tardiology (1968–69) and Dryice (1969), in which Nomura upended prior conceptions of structural integrity and time in sculpture. In Tardiology, the artist created a structurally unsound, twenty-six-foot-tall cardboard-box sculpture, the collapse of which he captured photographically over several days. Dryice records the dematerialization of a large stack of dry-ice blocks, with the passage of time annotated and the diminished structural mass noted. Nomura has continued to explore the implications of these early works in sculptures featuring liquid oxygen, such as Time Arrow: Oxygen –183° C (1993).
In the early 1970s, Nomura’s pioneering work in film and sound such as Practical Sculpt. Conversation (1970–74), Turning the Arm with a Movie Camera: Person, Landscape (1972), and The Brownian Motion of Eyesight (1972–82) brought records of the artist’s everyday activity and motion into the realm of conceptual art practice. In these works, frequently made over extremely long periods of time, Nomura’s material/ sculptural concerns took a back seat to records of place, orchestrated repetition of actions, and exercises in which chance is given free rein.
The randomness of Nomura’s experiments with Brownian motion inspired the pursuit of larger rhythms in the structure of the universe, as in The Sun on Latitude 35° N: Toyonaka (1986–2010), which is the centerpiece of our exhibition. Nomura first traced the daily movement of the sun through the sky photographically in 1980, capturing it with a fish-eye lens and a daylong exposure time from a fixed position. Different arcs of motion at different times of the year encouraged the artist to explore this phenomenon, realizing over a five-year period the first Sun on Latitude 35° N (1982–87). This is the fourth and final work in this series, and it represents 365 days of daylong photography in a vast, spiraling sculptural form that reveals the rhythmic movement of the Earth’s motion around the Sun.
Retrospectives of Nomura’s work have taken place at the National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka (1987); Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki (2000); Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota (2001); and most recently at the National Art Center, Tokyo (2009).
Media
Schedule
from September 15, 2010 to October 23, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-09-14 from 18:00 to 20:00