Inside the Garden: Iku Hara / Miyuki Takenaka

Gallery spaces, by nature, do not have much sense of life. They are places to view works, detached from the real world. Actually, in this, perhaps, they resemble the Western-style garden, which also attempts to form a kind of everyday zone in a reduced area, unconnected to the outside world. The exhibition deals with two artists who create garden-like spaces.
This is Harada’s first exhibition at Art Front Gallery. Her method is to draw scenery viewed virtually, her houses and parks are created in computers. She then replaces the virtual image with real canvases. Virtual and real intertwine in her work, which she sometimes places on the floor, as if to twist the exhibition area.
The other artist, Takenaka is known for motifs reminiscent of seeds and sprouts, and for organic works using light and shadow, created in acrylic. Her recent work, with more complex layering and use of new materials, has broken beyond the two dimensionality of walls. She has evolved a style with a combination of layering and drawing.
Although each artist’s work is complete and creates a kind of garden by itself, here they are positioned within the closed garden-like world, which is the space of a gallery. Walking among them, we are surely part of everyday life. Harada’s work traverses both virtual and real worlds, while Takenaka picks up light, and both will open up our everyday lives as we interact with them in this space.

Iku Harada creates computerized virtual reality spaces, with houses and parks. She then depicts scenes from that world in paint. There are trees and even a gallery with paintings exhibited. Computerized scenes are not real, without depth of the atmosphere, and are deprived of ambivalent gradation of colors caused by different lights in the real world. These are classical paintings insofar as they show virtual-reality views, but they are first created by computer. Even in her virtual world, the sun rises and shadows move with the passage of time. Harada replaces her computer-generated virtual image with a painted canvas, existing in a real world. Recently her works encompass to three-dimensional block which are then to be drawn on the canvas again, thus creating the interlocking relationship between two- and three-dimensional world.

Takenaka was drawing Seeds Series on canvas with water color which anticipates the sprouting. Then another method of applying resin between layers of acrylic board was introduced to be mingled with the drawing. These works of Takenaka reflects light and cast its shadow on white base panel, the shadow making different impression in different moments in time along with the soft blur made by water colors, and are well received in the broader context. In 2013, she challenged a new work using film which demonstrated something invisible by giving the film colour by exposure at arbitrary lengths of time.Resin in between layers of acrylic plates reflects light and cast its shadow on white base panel. The shadows makes different impression in different moments in time along with the soft blur made by water colors.