Detail: Temporal Measures
Futo Akiyoshi, Kouichi Tabata and Takahiro Ueda
2 December 2014 – 24 January 2015

White Rainbow is pleased to present, Temporal Measures, the gallery’s first group show, with Futo Akiyoshi, Kouichi Tabata and Takahiro Ueda. This exhibition draws together three artists, who are engaging with the physicality of their medium to articulate dimensions of time, layers of space, and realms of the mind. They have each developed a practice structured through regimes of space and time, and governed by self-imposed rules. Repetitive acts form a key part of their practice, acting like metronomic scales of measure dividing the immaterial. Their work is not only an exploration of the substance of time and space but a systematic framework for structuring experience, and a lens through which their subjects are observed.

Futo Akiyoshi’s ongoing golden painting series, Room, has been capturing light and perspectives in seductive yet simple forms since 2002. Akiyoshi paints minimal imagery of spaces, resolutely open-ended in their interpretation, each image repeatedly layered with the subtly varied tints of gold. Somehow transcending chromatic associations, gold lies between phenomena and colour, just as the works themselves are both spatial representation and surface abstraction. Kouichi Tabata makes motion paintings – moving stills – drawing repetitive imagery within a set of rules, and sequencing into animations. The projected imagery explores drawing beyond line- and mark-making, tending towards the painterly still life. Through the simple mechanism of choreographed frames, time is portrayed in layers of repeated action. Looped paintings relinquish tranquil scenery, instead capturing the audience in their relentless, endless cycle. In common with Akiyoshi, Tabata’s work originates from questions around the role of painting in a profligate digital era, accelerating their tendency to reduce, to distill, and to purify.

In contrast, Takahiro Ueda’s Invisible Movement utilises the arbitrary measures time from our daily life, re-asserting the material and perceptual quality of time. The work comprises a series of constructions built around quartz crystals, whose regular electronic oscillations pace clocks. Each construction contains two clocks: one using the same synthetic quartz as conventional watches, fabricated to time minutes and seconds, the other with natural quartz oscillating at its own pace. These measures of time will tick forever at a different pace – a quality resonating with our individual perceptions of time.