© SAWA Hiraki
spotter
| Artist | SAWA Hiraki |
|---|---|
| Year | 2003 |
| Material/ Technique | DVD |
| Size/ Duration | 7 min. 40 sec. |
| Copyright Notice | © SAWA Hiraki |
| Year of acquisition/ donation | 2005（作品購入年月日：2005/03/31） |
| Description | Born in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan in 1977. Lives and works in London, UK. While at university, Sawa Hiraki produced works including sculptures that one could physically enter, later going on to make video works using computers. He extracts scenes from footage of his own apartment as well as of scenery from around the world, reconstructs them, and, using a computer, superimposes photographs of model airplanes, children’s rocking horses, birds, shadows, and the like to create a different space-time. This form of expression, which has a palpable warmth on account of the lowtech methods employed, projects an airiness and lightness as well as a unique eccentricity. In recent years a more sculptural spatial composition can be detected in Sawa’s work, including spatial composition in which a sculptural approach has been adopted in the arrangement of the videos, and the juxtapositioning of objects and videos, for example. In his early works, Sawa depicted the polarity of the ordinary and the extraordinary in videos shot in the most ordinary and private of spaces in the form of the apartment in which he lived. In "spotter", in which the outside world intrudes into private space, airplanes, which enable people to fly all over the world in a short space of time, invade Sawa’s room and float around, while groups of people in different locations around the room follow their movements with binoculars and so on as they fly back and forth overhead. In "elsewhere", which depicts the extraordinary quietly unfolding in the midst of the ordinary, a kettle, a toilet paper roll, a shampoo bottle and other everyday items sprout legs and begin to wander around Sawa’s apartment. For the movement of the legs, Sawa used photographs originally used in chronophotography, a technique developed at the end of the 19th century before the invention of cinematography in which the body was photographed continuously in an attempt to analyze scientifically the movement of the human body. In "airliner", Sawa’s style of assimilating the outside world from his own perspective by drawing it into individual space is expressed in the even smaller world of a book. The card-flipping cartoon technique in which the airplanes look like they are moving as the pages are turned calls to mind the origins of cinematography, while the endless repetition of the page-turning movement gives the piece a sense of perpetuity. |
NOTES
This Collection Data page contains the works and materials in the collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, as of April 1, 2018.
Artists are listed alphabetically by artist’s surname.
Works and materials by the same artists are listed according to the date of the work in principle.
Works whose dates are unidentified are listed at the end of each item. Some works are not listed according to the date of work due to their relations.
The data of works and materials are listed in order of title, production year, material/technique/form, dimensions, donor’s name, copyright holder and credit for photograph.
Dimensions are given by height (H) x width (W) in centimeters for plane work, and height (H) x width (W) x depth (D) in cm for 3-D work. Diameter (Ø) is used for circular work.
For the name of country or city, the name currently used in English is listed in principle.