Takeshi Murata

Preview: 21st March 2007, 6-9pm

Takeshi Murata presents two video works in his first solo show in the UK.

‘Untitled (Pink Dot)’ (2006) and ‘Untitled (Silver)’ (2006) both twist and distort sequences from old movies to create surreal digital abstraction. In ‘Untitled (Silver)’, Murata’s original source material is the 1960’s horror film ‘Black Sunday’ by Italian director Mario Bava. A ghostly female figure wanders through a landscape and floats through ornate interiors, slipping in and out of perception. An alternating cascade of melting and condensing pixels constantly shift the emphasis from fixed form to fluid movement, in hallucinatory manipulations that are at once organic and digital. Her face becomes distorted and ungraspable and with every moment there is a repositioning of vision. The black and white film becomes an intensified layered fragmentation and reconstruction of light and darkness. The video is accompanied by a specially commissioned haunting electronic soundtrack by Robert Beatty and Ellen Mollé.

The videos also echo the virtual world of computer games, as the actors in the films are separated from the original narrative and background, and find themselves looping through Murata’s hallucinatory worlds. Whilst in ‘Untitled (Silver)’ the lone figure drifts through the removed gothic environment, in ‘Untitled (Pink Dot)’ a hypnotic pulsating pink dot strobes against a bright blue background from which commando Rambo emerges. The accompanying Robert Beatty soundtrack creates a trance-like, intense mesmeric atmosphere. Stallone arrives bazooka blazing into a psychedelic distortion that playfully dissolves into an explosion of colours, before re-forming momentarily into a recognizable figure or shape, only to descend in to digital degradation again.

Murata’s digitally animated process brings to mind old-fashioned animation and moving-picture precedents such as flipbooks, zoetropes and Muybridge’s motion studies. Similarly, the visual effect of the digital deconstructions recalls the breaking down of the image in both early Cubist representations of movement, as well as in Impressionist painters’ brushstrokes.

Takeshi Murata lives and works in New York. Solo shows: gallery.sora, Tokyo, Japan (forthcoming); Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (forthcoming); Silver Equinox, Ratio 3, San Francisco, CA (2006); Takeshi Murata, Machine Project, Los Angeles (2006).

Group Exhibitions and Screenings; Grimm Rosenfeld, New York (2006); They Heart a Computer, The Kitchen, New York (2006); Take It to the Net, Vilma Gold, London (2006); Cosmic Wonder, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2006); Dereconstruction, Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY (2006); By Design, Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2006).

Takeshi Murata
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