EXHIBITIONS

Cerith Wyn Evans

Dates: Mar 20 – Apr 18, 2015
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery Tokyo
Opening reception: Friday, Mar 20, 18:00 – 20:00
A live performance by musician Keiji Haino will take place from 19:00 on the day of the opening reception.

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Cerith Wyn Evans from March 20th to April 18th, 2015. The exhibition marks Wyn Evans’ third solo presentation at Taka Ishii Gallery since his previous gallery showing four years ago, and will feature three new works created specifically for this occasion, centering upon a large mobile-shaped sound sculpture.

Wyn Evans began his career as a filmmaker. He made an array of short, experimental films throughout the 1980s, which he personally referred to as ‘sculptures.’ Since the 1990s his works have employed a variety of media such as neon, sound, mirrors, and fireworks, with their fundamental and consistent characteristic resting upon the artist’s ingenious use of citation. Wyn Evans’s works are mediating vessels that connect sources of reference and the viewer, and often function as catalysts for indication. The citations within his works is informed by a diverse range of cultural and academic spheres in the manner of literature, philosophy, film, music, further extending to realms of astronomy and physics. Adorned with the artist’s profound intellect, melancholy, and affluent wit, Wyn Evans’ sculptures and installations have been highly refined into sublimated esoteric mediums of expression that are imbued with a meditative air of sophistication.

Growing up in a dual linguistic environment of Welsh and English, Wyn Evans from a young age had recognized the possibility of expressing a single word through the appropriation of two distinctly different languages. Furthermore, his deep interest had been with the discrepancies in linguistic forms that seemingly reveal themselves in the context of defining an equivalent notion, and their slight and inevitable slippage of meaning. Wyn Evans stimulates the prospects of our perception through the interposing of heterogeneous mediums, which could be described as a fecund attempt on the part of the artist to reconstruct the relationship between a particular concept and the viewer, and the mediating object itself.

The sound sculpture which will be presented in this exhibition enlists the form of a large mobile consisting of four discs. The discs are mirrored on their one side, and on the adverse are embedded with a special speaker that emits sound in a singular, focused direction, allowing it only be heard by an individual standing directly before it. The mobile appears to maintain an eloquent and meditative equipoise whilst resonating a delicate noise that entices one’s senses like a gravitational lure. From time to time the viewers are exposed to a ray of sound that drifts solely towards their ears, consequently heightening one’s awareness of transformations in spatial perception.

Cerith Wyn Evans was born in 1958 in Llanelli, Wales, and currently lives and works in London. His recent solo exhibitions include Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2014), Kunsthall Bergen, Norway (2011), Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City (2010), The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (2008), Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (2006), with participation in group exhibitions including, Aichi Triennale (2010), a collaborative participation with Florian Hecker in the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), “The Kaleidoscopic Eye: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection” at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2009), and the Yokohama Triennale (2008). A solo exhibition of Wyn Evans’ work is anticipated to take place in October 2015 at Museion, Bolzano, Italy.

[ Publication details ]
Expected publication date: mid-Apr, 2015; retail price: TBC; published by Taka Ishii Gallery

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