Rendering the phenomena of attraction of bodies and materials perceptible and presenting the secret relationships between objects and the spaces that they occupy: this could be the programme of this exhibition that brings together Keiji Uematsu (1947, Kobe, Japan), Dave Hardy (1969, Brooklyn, United States), and Letha Wilson (1976, Honolulu, Hawaii).
Drawing on the essential and physical qualities of the materials that they work with, their artworks reveal the forces that act on space and defy the laws of gravity.
Keiji Uematsu, associated with conceptual art and the Japanese Mono-Ha movement of the late 1960s, explores the encounters between natural and industrial materials, which he selects for their raw simplicity and based on their environment. In his drawings, he imagines situations and arrangements with a precarious balance, in a serial manner, presenting new systems for measuring space. His multidisciplinary practice seeks to bring the energies that organise the world and matter into tension, to reinvent our perception of them, every time.
Dave Hardy also questions through his sculptures the laws that govern our world, their interactions, and their points of harmony. Associating objects from everyday life with reused industrial materials, he composes “autonomous structures of various sizes that seem to override the basic principles of balance and gravity with the grandiloquence of impossible shapes.” The contradictions and contortions that he inflicts on matter push back the limits of physics and engage the spectator in a physical confrontation.
As for Letha Wilson, she tests our relationship to space through a skilful and dense hybridisation of materials. The images that she collects in the canyons and deserts of the American West to print onto concrete and the natural elements that she photographs then prints onto geometric material – in short, the new physical regime that she imposes on images – redefine the very notion of landscape.
