Solo exhibition "outside smell" at Niji Gallery, Kichijoji, Tokyo, August 2023.
A solo exhibition "outside smell" was held at "Niji Gallery" in Kichijoji, Tokyo in August 2023.
In this solo exhibition, I painted on canvas with acrylic paint, and used nail tackers to nail scrap wood with various cross-sectional patterns to the edges of the canvas.
By intentionally creating an irregular balance in the shape of the frame, I aimed to create a work in which the canvas and the frame became one.
The overall theme of this exhibition is that I thought that healing for me, living in the post-Corona world, would be the rich emotions I feel outside, and I imagined and painted a story of a young man's small journey by bicycle into some mysterious rural village.
I titled the exhibition "outside smell" because I feel that the smells that can only be felt outside, whether pleasant or unpleasant, are all etched in my mind forever.
この展示の全体のテーマは、コロナ後の世界で生きる自分にとっての癒しとは外に出て感じる豊かな感情ではないかと考え、どこかの怪しい田舎の村に自転車で入る青年の小さな旅の物語の様なものを想像して絵を描いた。
展示タイトルを「outside smell」とつけたのは、外でしか感じる事ができない匂い、それは心地の良い匂いも不快な匂いも全て自分の脳裏にずっと刻まれている気がしたからだ。
In addition to works on canvas, he also created several works on tiles. This one, titled "Strata Textures and the Forgotten Dead," exhibited the tiles as a single assemblage.
I sometimes wonder if our forgotten ancestors are buried physically and spiritually under the ground that sustains us in the present, so I made the layout look like a young man riding a bicycle over the textured pattern of the ground and the buried people and monsters of the past.
Each of the paintings in the exhibition was accompanied by a soundtrack. A QR code was posted on the caption so that visitors could listen to the sounds on SoundCloud.
The sounds I used were not "songs" but rather background music to stimulate the viewer's imagination while looking at the paintings.
I created the sounds, my friend Shinjiro Yamaguchi, a designer and musician, created the sounds, and my son used a sampler to create one of the sounds.
I did not create the sounds after looking at the paintings, but rather I gave them a rough image and asked them to create the sound, and finally I chose the sound that best suited the painting.
The "outside smell zine" created for this exhibition is a strange binding, in which the drawings are re-painted in risograph format, and the left and right facing pages are divided into top and bottom pages, making it more like a mysterious travel story. The QR code is attached to this zine so that the sounds can also be listened to.
You can also listen to the soundtrack here, if you have time.
