February 2011
MEGUMI MATSUBARA
I’ve chosen experiential space as my medium. The space where architecture and art meet, where the borders between the two cease to be an issue. My approach is an attempt to reveal a different awareness of spatiality; to explore, through a collection of ephemeral experiences, the other side of the pleats that is always hidden, the mechanisms of a secretive world .
To begin with, I don’t see the borders between visible/invisible, heard/unheard, countable/uncountable. Important to the process of my work, is not the drawing of a line between ‘whether’ or ‘not’, but the search for a balance between two seemingly opposite phenomena. When I succeed to bring about this balance into existence, a situation emerges where the boundaries between notions such as visible/invisible that are said to exist as a matter of course, disappear into thin air. This in fact happens every day in our lives. It’s nothing special. A reflection of a building in a puddle on a rainy day, for example, is not separated from and is accepted as part of the whole scenery. The borders between two entities are sensitive and can always be rearranged by employing different perspectives.
I am fascinated by the notions of ‘absence’ and ‘nonsense’. I believe in a world where meanings are made available but are not easily graspable. I believe in misunderstanding, misinterpreted concepts, distorted memories and eerie perceptions. They guide us to encounter unexpected issues or inconvenient situations that are external to our expectations. I don’t believe in my own world only. I want others to participate and associate with my work at multiple levels overlaid on top of my world.
In the contemporary age, everything is connected and layered like a Matryoshka doll. Everything is inside us while we are inside everything. I’m fascinated by how memory and psychological moods affect what is perceived in space. What inspires me is the moment where things match up or align, allowing me to discern a sense of order or a pattern that gives rise to a kind of clarity. I choose abstraction and metaphors to control spaces as they function as a language used to design a moment available for anyone to associate with untold or absent plots. Such spatial qualities are similar to the qualities of urban environments where selves are endlessly projected.
I am interested in setting up a theatrical stage where actors and plots are absent, governed solely by sensory systems. A sensory understanding of space enables a constant reorganization of relationships between self/others, a reconstruction of social systems, an arrangement of political negotiations, and a sharing of complexities that elude simplification.
This aspiration towards the constant rearrangement of any type of systems and formalization expands into the organizational form of my practice as well. I am an individual artist myself as well as being part of my own studio, serving as one of the collective. These inextricably linked selves or self/other relationships are a key approach to space, the medium I work with. The two sides, the outside/inside of a mirror, expand my spatial approach that is open to the unknown.
The structure of fragility is more dependent on the ability of balancing multiple elements than on forming something concretely simplified. I believe such process-oriented, ever-changing spatial rearrangement extends people’s perception into further attentive awareness, opening more links to the things yet unknown.