Motohiro Takeda: Something To Remember You By

Alison Bradley Projects is thrilled to announce Motohiro Takeda: Something To Remember You By, the artist’s debut solo exhibition in New York City. On view from September 5th, the exhibition runs until November 2nd, with an artist reception on September 12th from 6:00 - 8:00pm.

The work of Motohiro Takeda (b. 1982, Hamamatsu, Japan) resists the speed, spectacle, and excess of contemporary life by channeling a deeply interdisciplinary mode—encompassing sculpture, installation, charcoal on canvas, photography, ceramics, and concrete wall works. For the solo presentation Something To Remember You By, Takeda creates an environment where viewers experience a renewed relationship with the passage of time, into a place slowed to stillness. The visitor will encounter Takeda’s masterful range of objects; imbued with a timeless quality and created through his variety of techniques, and sensitivity to materials. He offers us a concept of relationality—between viewer, object, and space.

Emblematic of Takeda’s practice is his use of raw materials, namely found wood, stone, and concrete, activated by fire. A central work of the show, Untitled (Spear), demonstrates Takeda’s reworking of materials in a cyclical closed-system, harnessing the metamorphic power of fire to both construct and destroy. His transformation ritual begins with a narrow tree trunk foraged from a forest floor in upstate New York. Takeda ceremoniously creates a mold of the wooden form and casts it in concrete, producing two formally identical objects—one created by man and the other by nature. The artist then burns the concrete facsimile in fire fueled by the original wood, browning the stoney surface until it begins to mimic tree bark. The emerging sculpture stands as an uncanny memorial to the natural form, ironically destroyed in its creation.

Takeda blackens his works through shou sugi ban or yakisugi, a Japanese wood-burning technique that involves charring wood to weatherproof and preserve it. Through burning—what the artist describes as “a dance between chance and control”—Takeda also creates his own charcoal, which is used on canvas works and often as an ashy wall treatment.

The monumental canvas triptych Something To Remember You By, from which the show takes its name, captures a jagged mountainscape of push-and-pull gestures with his self-produced charcoal. By applying his own measured hand over the wild and chaotic energies of open fire, Takeda forges a unique relationship with natural processes and material transformations.

The works on display exemplify Takeda’s signature visual language, and its focus on dualities: chaos and order, reason and emotion, life and death, resurgence and decay, time and space, human and environment. In his Hanaikada (Flower Boat) series, the artist suspends delicate cherry blossoms in concrete, the extreme contrast of materials highlighting the ephemeral nature of the blooms.

Conceptualized during fatherhood, Takeda’s photographic works are created by a unique process he created using expired film to image light and then contact printed on gelatin silver paper. These gridded pieces consider the memories that could have been, or photographic images that cannot be captured.

In the words of the artist: “Ultimately, I am cultivating a garden of time or something that encompasses the garden within itself, like a Japanese stone garden or karesansui, which contains the universe within. In our increasingly urban and digital world, I believe there is a pressing need for this kind of artistic practice that strives to connect us with earthly and cosmic timescapes and encourage us to reflect on our existence.”

Something To Remember You By references the nature of transformation, creating works conceived by the destruction of matter and their reconstitution. In a city brimming with energy and ever-constant motion, Takeda’s quiet practice and the metamorphic quality of his objects inspire reflection.