June 19 - July 24, 2005
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Click here for Yumi Kori's RESUME
(June 1, 2005; Seattle, WA) Tokyo-based architect and installation artist, Yumi Kori will transform the galley of Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) into a space without limits with her exhibition, INFINITATION, which will open on Friday, June 17th at 8 P.M. to midnight. Kori is a practicing architect and is the principal of Studio Myu, a Tokyo-based architecture firm. As well, Kori is an adjunct professor of architecture at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York City. Within the past five years, she has twice won honorable mention from The Architectural Review's prestigious AR+D award: once for a building in Japan and the other for an installation in Germany. The installation was the first of the Defragmentation series in which Kori has worked with Viennese sound artist Bernhard Gal. INFINITATION will also feature a soundscape designed in collaboration with Gal.
INFINITATION will be consist of two parts. One is the darkened gallery, controlled lighting and sound, a pier positioned to visually “penetrate infinity” through the “dematerialized” floor. The other is a small architectural device Kori explains is to “invite people to explore infinity.” Rather than a linear narrative or a sculptural confrontation, Kori’s approach is experiential in a way that harkens both to Western installation art and the more meditatively philosophical tradition of Japanese gardens and landscape architecture. Kori explains her goal: “In a modern city, every square inch is measured, defined, regulated and documented. It seems that everything on the earth is calculated and flattened into one layer. I believe that space should not be measured in such a way. A small room might be experienced as vast space, a huge house felt as a tight space depending on a viewer’s spatial perception. I am creating an installation that reincarnates a sense of ‘infinity.’ My work will give people a chance to discover another dimension in the existing city beyond conventional functions, preconceived meanings and measurable scale.” INFINITATION is no exception to Kori’s intense focus on individual spatial experience and sophisticated use of light in her installations. Rather than employing light merely to illuminate objects, Kori uses light to focus and contain the viewer’s visual field. In her hands, light becomes a spatial tool that defines and installs the viewer in a specific environment clearly demarcated from the diurnal world. And as spare as the environment might be, Kori’s use of light can range from spartan to lush. Illumination becomes a framing device and often serves to conceal as much as it reveals. The effects go beyond the visual and reach to the very elements the viewer uses to posit her/his body in the landscape. The result is deliciously liberating. The transformation and specific focus on the potential of a space is maybe most intensely relevant to a gallery space intended for art. CoCA's new home is the place for potential history (as is any significant contemporary art space) and it is a place where the primary performances will be by objects such as paintings, sculpture, etc. Kori’s art attempts to achieve the unlikely transformation of making the vessel into the thing it is purported to contain. It is not about architecture-as-sculpture (a critical element of some of Kori’s architecture), but rather about architecture-as-the-expansion-of-means. Core ideas at stake in this conceptual shift have a significant role in much Eastern and Japanese thinking: the American viewer might benefit by taking as context notions of Zen or Tea Ceremony over any traditional mode of Western cultural thought. INFINITATION is about expansion and a lack of boundaries. It is about leaving the physical fact of objects behind and moving into the realm of ideas and unabated possibility. Yumi Kori: Infinitation was co-curated by Daniel Kany and Michael Sweney. It was organized by the curators, Board President John Gascon (Callison Architects) and Board Member Philip Smith. It is presented by the Young Architects Forum and sponsored by Center on Contemporary Art. Kori’s work on Infinitation was sponsored in part by the Japanese Agency of Cultural Affairs. CoCA serves the Pacific Northwest as a catalyst and forum for the advancement, development, and understanding of contemporary art. CoCA provides opportunities for the art audience in this region to view new and experimental artwork firsthand in exhibitions which show the work of international, national and local artists.
Publication-quality images available on request. |
