HYPERDIMENSION
A solo exhibition of new paintings
JUNE 19 - JULY 25, 2021
Right from the beginning of her career, Makita has represented living things and natural landscapes in her works by using artificial objects made of materials such as metal and plastic (as a motif.). A.I. technology has become a "natural" part of our daily lives and the main concern of Makita’s artwork is to visualize the fluctuating boundaries between natural | artificial, organic | inorganic, digital | analog, material | data.
After experiencing the corona pandemic, Makita recently became very aware of the boundary between "inside" and "outside". Getting information about the outdoors from inside a house, communicating through a screen, staying in one's country without being able to travel abroad freely. This solo exhibition "Hyperdimension" is a site-specific installation consisting of paintings, photos and movies used as a conduit to connect and explore the gap between the inner and outer aspects of Makita’s world.
“Crustal movement” is a large-scale illusory painting consisting of two canvases combined at the corner of the gallery. These canvases are actually both trapezoid but they merge to form a rectangular shape that jumps out from the gallery wall when viewed from a particular point. This painting brings another perspective to the gallery space and confuses the viewer’s senses. The wavy images are suggestive of Japanese earthquakes and Tsunamis, deceiving the viewers as though the image had moved inside the painting.
“Out-n-In” is a collaboration with architect, Yuta Hosoya. Hosoya took photos of the architectural landscape in NYC and extracted some specific 2-dimensional outlines from the photos. Then, without looking at the original photos, Makita created paintings using the 2-dimensional outlines as reference points.
This installation uses architecture as a motif symbolizing the inside and the outside, and after extracting the outline information Makita reconstructs it as a painting reflecting her inner mental landscape.
“Over the Window” is also a site-specific collaboration with Yuma Kishi, a contemporary artist working with A.I. Makita placed a fixed-point camera by a window at the gallery to capture the outside once every hour, then Kishi created a time lapse movie by rendering Makita’s painting image with the stills.
The window is the threshold between inside and out and played an important role throughout the stay-at-home order amid the pandemic. The monitor image now plays the role of another "window" for the gallery, intersecting with reality and fiction.
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Ai Makita (b.1985) is a Tokyo and New York based visual artist. After receiving an M.F.A. from the Tokyo National University of the Arts in 2013, her painting was selected for a permanent collection at the Museum of Tokyo National University of the Arts. Whilst participating in a residency program in New York in 2017, Makita was selected as an exhibitor at the Consulate General of Japan in New York, where her paintings were exhibited for two months.
Makita has received numerous awards, fellowships, and residency programs, including the Terrada Art Award(Tokyo), Taro Okamoto Award (Tokyo), POLA Art Foundation Fellowship (Tokyo), Finalist of Rijksakademie (Amsterdam), ART CAKE (New York), Residency Unlimited (New York) and the Varda Artist in Residency (Sausalito).
https://www.ai-makita.com
https://www.instagram.com/ai_mkt