Takeshi Shiomitsu @ Happy Times, Sep 12 – 14

, 11 September 2014
news

A short solo exhibition from Takeshi ShiomitsuWASH, is happening at a space at Milcote House in London, provisionally called Happy Times, running over three days from September 12 to 14.

Most recently exhibiting alongside Sandra Vaka Olsen in Copenhagen for their joint Every Line Ever Spoken show, Shiomitsu’s work spans text, video and painting, in a seeming traversal across degrees of the imagined to the material where his apparent fascinations lie.

Existing at the nebulous point where abstraction ends and organisation begins, the artist’s almost fetishistic examination of physical space as expression of ideological power constructs emerges in this exhibition text exploring structural hierarchies at their most literal (and literary), taking form in cargo shipping:

“a freight liner is a pre-museum: a potential site of ethnographic study,
too contemporary to tell us much

a material history is the context of the existence of an artefact, inscribed into its physicality
its components, what matter constitutes the components,
how they come into being how they were conceived and fabricated but then
suddenly they are inside smearrless cabinets
(cleaned with alkali solution every morning)
under UV-filtered lights, minimal contaminates, an environment that protects from foreign bodies and acts of god
optimal archival conditions
the cabinets were built to last & be easily maintained
just trying to get through each year, yeah i get that
killing time; it won’t die

institutions and warehouse units contain an arrangement-compilation of some lineage of colloquial understandings of history and potential:
they all just seem to be
viscous
architectures housing capricious artefacts, ok

every artefact acquires traces, its history of contact
I hope I cut my finger on the sharp of the mitre of the edge of an MDF panel tomorrow
elements are distinct decontextualized
trans-global flows regardless
elements are distinct
(sorry, i, didn’t mean to come across like that)”

See the Facebook event page for details. **