Exhibition

Alex Ito & Masami Kubo: Bouquet Complex

16 Apr 2016 – 22 May 2016

Regular hours

Sunday
13:00 – 18:00

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Kimberly-Klark is pleased to present Bouquet Complex, a two-person exhibition by Alex Ito and Masami Kubo.

About

Somewhere within an aloof horizon, there is a menagerie of unraveling objects. Exhausted by the infinite parading of sentiment, rarely do the objects tell much of themselves. Upon realizing the irony of their circumstances, the objects collapse and the menagerie blushes; a bouquet of sorts.

Bouquet Complex presents a series of artifacts and familial ephemera that navigate the materialization of trauma and sentiment. Framed by architectural installation, Ito and Kubo design a platform for performance and sculpture that investigates the entanglement between images, power and personal history. In doing so, they shed light on narratives that would otherwise be obscured by rapid transformations within the contemporary techno-political climate.

Kubo’s "Figure 02: A History of Two Chairs" is the second part of an ongoing series of slideshow presentations and sculptural installations investigating a relationship between technology, image culture, and belief systems. The slideshow depicts Kubo’s upbringing under the religious movement Unificationism, in dialogue with pop culture and art history. The motif of chairs throughout Kubo’s slideshow bridges commodified sacred spaces within the Unification Church to various popular representations of chairs throughout time. By exploring a disjointed history of chairs, Kubo demystifies and recontextualizes the complexes of belief, beginning with the Unification Church and broadening the conversation.

Ito’s "9066(Hideyuki/Sueko)" continues the artist’s investigation of the relationship between intimacy and violence in consumer culture. The work comprises of a commercial vitrine housing propaganda cartoons by Dr. Seuss during World War II, portraits of Ito’s family after World War II and plastic replicas of carvings made by Ito’s grandfather during his imprisonment at a Japanese internment camp. The commodifying display of the vitrine creates a mechanism that abstracts and flattens Ito’s materials into a singular image, obscuring and assaulting the original references. Ito’s mechanism illustrates the dilution of cultural narratives by pop-culture and state power.
 

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Alex Ito

Masami Kubo

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