Walking into the Hiraki Sawa exhibit Under the Box, Beyond the Bounds, currently on at the Greater Victoria Art Gallery, is like walking into a familiar place you’ve never been to before.
Throughout the exhibit, video screens and projectors, from the size of a wallet to the size of a wall, display images and landscapes, mostly spare interiors of apartments, that are instantly recognizable, and yet are populated by nothing less than the fantastic. Look closely and you see a herd of antelope swimming through a kitchen sink, airplanes taking off from a bed, a dancer who spins inside multiple copies of herself, and a toaster that sprouts legs and walks across the counter.
Sawa, a Japanese-born artist who now lives in London, England, is a master of his techniques, and in recent work the various styles of animation blend flawlessly into the landscape. Although his earlier works show more clearly the seams of his creative process (layering images together in a collage-like fashion), the effect is a heightened sense of the juxtaposition between the unreal and the everyday. In Elsewhere, salt shakers, scissors, and a tea kettle walk about the kitchen counter. (Sawa began the piece by asking, “What happens in my apartment when I’m not there?”)
Video art has a reputation for being hard to understand, but Sawa’s work is instantly approachable. It begins in imagination, and the full possibilities of imagination blossom in each piece. Taken on their own, the videos are stunning examples of visual composition, light, shadow, and texture. When viewed together as an exhibit, they paint a picture of imagination at work on memory and time. Partly a result of his medium, these subjects have personal resonance for the artist.
Lineament, which examines a man trapped inside bizarre and unravelling mechanisms, was inspired by the experience of a close friend who suffered sudden-onset amnesia. The interior void left by such an event is clearly of interest to an artist so preoccupied with the process of looking inside.
This inversion of the gaze from outside to inside is a common theme in Sawa’s work. In Departures, his first video project, Sawa filled his apartment with miniature flying airplanes. The piece examines borders, both outside our domestic environment and within.
The world at large becomes the world inside our homes, which ultimately becomes the world inside ourselves. Our day-to-day lives and domestic spaces contain the potential for exploration; Sawa’s work shows us how to penetrate the screen of the everyday and reveal the extraordinary that’s lurking behind.
Along with exploration comes the potential for discovery. Sawa’s interior landscapes are not only analogues of the wider world: they are the jungles of possibility inside ourselves where self-discovery can happen.
Under the Box, Beyond the Bounds
Until January 11
$11-$13, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
aggv.ca