Ratio 3 is pleased to announce 1000 Years, an exhibition of new artworks by Takeshi Murata. Featuring six new computer-generated images printed on metallic paper and a continuous video animation, Murata’s latest exhibition presents idealized versions of familiar objects from the real world. Through meticulous treatment of virtual materials of his own design and exquisitely rendered subject matter, Murata has produced a series of uncanny images of objects that are at once captivating, humorous, and foreboding.
As in the artist’s earlier series of computer-generated still lifes, Murata uses the most advanced computer imaging tools to fabricate sculptures entirely within an artificial environment. Yet, where Murata’s previous still lifes were composed of multiple objects arranged to suggest narratives, the artworks comprising 1000 Years are each a deliberate meditation on a particular object. Devices that would be mundane in another context are made monumental and exceptional; a set of handcuffs, a cuckoo clock, and a candle are each magnified and depicted within infinite, dark virtual spaces. By drawing on the objects’ inherent cultural references, Murata produces specific images that invite open-ended allegory, elevating each object to the status of a totem or omen.
With 1000 Years, Murata returns to a meditative approach to art making, providing a distilled counterpoint to his recent long-form narrative video (OM Rider, 2013) and immersive animation installation (Melter 3D, 2014). Murata’s latest images bridge sculpture and photography, while remaining decidedly neither. Bringing sculptures out of a digital space through a virtual process akin to photography, Murata presents a mysterious yet familiar world. By withholding many of the common queues for categorizing artworks, Murata’s images question both the role of material in art objects and the expectations placed on images in an increasingly saturated visual world. Both because of and despite their hi-tech origins, Murata’s sculptural images are eerily of-the-moment and timeless.
Takeshi Murata was born in 1974 in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 with a B.F.A. in Film, Video, and Animation. Murata’s work was recently the subject of a survey at the Kunsthall Stavanger in Norway. Murata has had other recent solo exhibitions at Salon 94, New York; Kasia Michalski, Warsaw; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC. His work has been included in exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; and the American Academy in Rome. Murata’s sculptural animation Melter 3D was featured prominently in the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural exhibition. Murata recently relocated to live and work in Los Angeles, CA. This is his fifth solo exhibition with Ratio 3.

Opening reception: Saturday, January 14, 6-8pm

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