Motohiro Takeda’s Garden of Time
Installation view of Motohiro Takeda: Something To Remember You By at Alison Bradley Projects. Photo © Dario Lasagni 2024.
Something To Remember You By marks the first major solo show for artist Motohiro Takeda (b. 1982, Hamamatsu, Japan). Tucked away in Alison Bradley Projects’ eighth-floor gallery space on West 26th Street, the quiet, pensive exhibition is a testament to the value of close looking and lengthy contemplation. On view until November 2nd, the show presents pieces across various media by the artist, who uses almost entirely found and re-purposed materials.
Installation view of Motohiro Takeda: Something To Remember You By at Alison Bradley Projects. Photo © Dario Lasagni 2024.
Takeda works with the goal of bringing humans closer to their immediate environments, evoking intimate dialogues with the most basic cycles of materials in an increasingly oversaturated digital age. The minimal and snug gallery space initiates a narrowing of the viewer’s vision, a shrinking of spatial scale. The artworks themselves do much more: at first, second, and even third glance, Untitled (Spear) looks exactly like a long, thin tree trunk mounted vertically in the middle of the room. In fact, this piece is a concrete cast of a tree trunk found on a forest floor, and it has been burned by fire fuelled by the original tree. Using Japanese wood-burning techniques (shou sugi ban or yakisugi), Takeda creates a closed system of organic and inorganic materials, manually guiding life into death and back again.
Such uncanniness defines the scope of the artist’s work. For instance, the largest work in the space, Something To Remember You By, is a massive tripart canvas painted entirely with charcoal, largely produced by the fire that created the burn marks on Untitled (Spear). Within this closed system of materials, Takeda works through a meditative progression—deconstruction and reinvention—until several entirely new things stand in its place. The elegance of this unifying endeavor not only creates a sense of cohesion amongst the artworks themselves, but also between the viewer and the artwork. Dialogue in this show proves itself cyclical, a repetition of making and unmaking that spirals into a welcoming silence.
Installation view of Motohiro Takeda: Something To Remember You By at Alison Bradley Projects. Photo © Dario Lasagni 2024.
The exhibition space is organized into three sections: the main gallery room contains Takeda’s organic and nature-focused works, including the titular triptych Something To Remember You By, several absorbing sculptural shapes, and three of his flower-in-concrete Hanakaida pieces. Here, the artist’s quote in the wall text offers the most legible introduction: “I am trying to create a garden of time, or something that encompasses the garden within itself, like a Japanese stone garden or karesansui, which contains the universe within.” The eerie contrast between the slowly decaying organic material and the unchanging concrete epitomizes the self-resolving paradox that governs this show. The careful arrangements of small remnants of nature—pieces of wood, tree bark, leaves, and petals of dead flowers—expand on this theme of evoking the universal by highlighting the minute.
The second part of the show is the outermost section of the gallery, where Takeda’s photographic works encompass the gallery’s small office workspace. On the wall are three examples of Takeda’s Somewhere in the Garden works, in which the artist exposed stacks of expired 35mm film to varying degrees of light over time, assembling them in a large grid of subtly shifting light and dark values. The nuanced, repetitive textural quality of the film’s curled corners against a matte backboard is among the several tiny yet rewarding details that emerge the longer one stares, entranced, at the expanse of unrecorded time.
Installation view of Motohiro Takeda: Something To Remember You By at Alison Bradley Projects. Photo © Dario Lasagni 2024.
The show culminates in a seemingly mundane line-up of small sculptural and found objects assembled on the window sill of the gallery’s grid windows, foregrounding the sweeping midtown vista. Several small sculptural objects incorporate shapes left by the artist’s fingerprints to create a coral-like texture, whereas more casts of driftwood and a stack of expired negatives synthesize the two previous phases of the viewer’s visual progression. The most glaring outlier among these small, indistinct-looking relics is a worn pair of white sneakers. They are, in fact, the key to reading the entire window sill: Brought along to each successive studio space, they belong to Takeda, who has been unable to part with them after he stopped wearing them over a year ago. As I am told the story of these shoes, the entire narrative here becomes obvious. This is not just art about memory, or about memorial, or even about cycles of rebirth. This is art about ghosts, and the spaces they inhabit.
Installation view of Motohiro Takeda: Something To Remember You By at Alison Bradley Projects. Photo © Dario Lasagni 2024.
Motohiro Takeda: Something To Remember You By is on view at Alison Bradley Projects from Sept 5th to Nov 2nd, 2024.
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