Living Cube      

An interactive installation by Rie Kawakami in the Main Gallery of The Lab

Opening Reception: Friday, April 10, 6-9pm
Exhibition runs: April 8 - May 2, 2009
Gallery hours: Wednesdays - Saturdays, 1-6pm
At The Lab, 2948 Sixteenth Street @ Capp
Lecture: Thursday, April 9th, 7pm at San Francisco State University, Fine Arts Building, Room 193

The Living Cube project is an interactive installation that allows visitors to distort an initial grid sculpture as they pass through the gallery. The process of change over time will be documented by the artist. With a sensibility influenced by the “Wabi-sabi” aesthetic in Japanese culture, Kawakami creates metal sculpture with the goal of combining architectural and organic forms.

Kawakami is interested in the uncertainty around the minimum unit that composes material, as well as where the vast universe ends. Her work begins with the awareness that we are both one unit composed of minute particles, and also elements that make up a larger society. Kawakami’s work attempts to express the life force, or “will” that she sees in all natural phenomena, both animate and inanimate, and the role of human existence in directing the course of the universe.

Rie Kawakami is a visiting artist in residence from Hokkaido, Japan. She received her MFA in metal work from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts. She is a former artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, Location One in New York and Border Art Residency in New Mexico.


Statement;

I believe that both organic and inorganic existence has “will” and that the universe exists by the accumulation and chain of “will”.

I am interested in the mystery of the unknown quantity result that is developed when individuals gather to be a group, or each part gather to be a whole.
 
The project, “LIVING CUBE”starts with geometrically formed wire objects (64 x 38”square Cubes on ceiling and same 64 cubes on the floor).

The whole affair of the object (cubes on the floor) will change by the interaction of both visitor's will and object's will.

This project is to present the metaphor of unified life form that is consists of many individual's“will”.

April 8, 2009
Rie Kawakami



作品について；

私は、有機的そして無機的それぞれの存在が「意思」を持っていると考えます。

個々の存在が集まり、部分が集合して集合体を形成するとき、それは、視点を変えれば一つの生命体と捉えることも出来ます。私はそうしたミクロとマクロの関係について興味があります。

「リビング・キューブ」は、幾何学的に形成されたワイヤーオブジェクトー１ｍ角立方体、天井に64個、床に64個の配列から始まります。

床に配列されたキューブは、訪問者の「意思」と物体の「意思」両方の相互作用によって変化します。

このプロジェクトは、それらの集積によって形成される全体感を一つの生命の比喩表現として提示することを試みたものです。

2009年４月８日
川上りえ