Eight Minutes

Hiraka Sawa
Screening
Friday, September 4th - Sunday, November 1st, 2009

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Screening is pleased to present Hiraki Sawa’s Eight Minutes, a mesmerizing series of eight short vignettes comprised of the artist’s trademark dreamscape imagery.  Sawa employs innovative animation techniques to transform the most quotidian of domestic scenes into beguiling visions—a wash basin becomes a lake and countertops become plains inhabited by vegetation and traversed by wild animals.  In applying the logic of contemporary/digital videomaking to

Muybridge’s early motion studies, Sawa confounds viewers understanding of pictorial time and space.  Dramatic shifts in scale and the hypnotically looped motion of Sawa’s figures add to the surreal tension of these scenes, which simultaneously speak of a child’s daydream and a convalescent’s hallucinations, while pointing towards broader themes of the rift between contemporary domestic life and the natural world.

Hiraki Sawa is a Japanese artist based in London.  His video work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC and the Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles and has also been included in the Yokohama Triennial, 2005 and the Lyon Biennial, 2003.  Sawa is represented by James Cohan Gallery, NYC.