Megumi Matsubara participates in SLOW DIALOGUES: Time, Space, and Scale: three persons show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco, U.S.A., presenting a new site-specific installation It Is a Garden interacting intimately with YBCA’s architecture designed by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki:
‘SLOW DIALOGUES: Time, Space, and Scale’
Works by Jorge Otero-Pailos, Megumi Matsubara, Maria Blaisse
Guest curated by Slow Research Lab
Organized and produced by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)
Opening:
22 Apr 2016, 18:00-
Megumi Matsubara will be present at the opening reception and the following artist talk.
Exhibition:
SLOW DIALOGUES: Time, Space, and Scale invites holistic, reflective and critical understandings of both our immediate surroundings and our greater environment. Exploring the themes time, space, and scale, three international artists bring their diverse creative perspectives and approaches into site-specific dialogue with social, cultural, and environmental conditions of the Bay Area.
Artist and architectural preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos continues his ongoing series The Ethics of Dust, exploring what he considers to be humanity’s most prolific, and neglected, cultural product: pollution. Exploring the theme of time, Otero-Pailos was commissioned to create a latex cast of more than one-hundred years of accumulated pollution on the two chimneys of the Old United States Mint. This otherwise invisible and often overlooked material is transferred onto translucent sheets of latex, preserving the material realities of the site, and local histories of labor, resource extraction, industrialization, global capitalism, and urban redevelopment.
Megumi Matsubara’s It is a Garden (2016) engages with YBCA’s building through a site-specific installation of prints, photographs, glass, film, and mirrors. Inspired by the site’s close proximity to the Yerba Buena Gardens, Matsubara asks through her work “What are the invisible elements that define a garden’s presence? The constant effort of watering, caring, acting? The climate? The soil underneath?” Matsubara’s investigation of space through both visible and intangible layers of the site invites visitors to discover new sensorial and mental landscapes as part of a larger, multifaceted ecology of place.
In Traveling Geometry (2008-16), designer Maria Blaisse exhibits a dynamic array of sculptural bamboo forms, demonstrating her vision for the near-future: a humanity-built environment that is flexible and closer to nature. Two woven structures are displayed alongside film and photographs in which dancers engage them in graceful interplay. Another collection of simple bamboo lines suspended from the Grand Lobby ceiling activate the upper registers of the building, and will occasionally be lowered down to the lobby floor and engaged by live performers during the exhibition; a work exploring different scales.
Slow Dialogues is curated by Slow Research Lab, a Netherlands-based multidisciplinary research and curatorial platform that seeks to explore an expanded field of human awareness and activity through research residencies, workshops, exhibitions, reading groups, immersive study experiences, and dialogues.
