Texture of time

Mendes Wood DM is pleased to present Textures of time, an exhibition of sixteen new sculptures by the Japanese artist Kenji Ide.

Working in sculpture, Ide roots his practice both in memory and in interaction with his surroundings, translating intangible experiences relating to time, atmosphere, and human relationships into delicate material forms. His works emerge through a tentative, almost collage-like process, between the built and the found, taking on the quality of small, intricate sculptured structures, mechanisms, scapes, a fragmentary mapping that invites projection and reflection.

Installed in the Germantown gallery, Textures of time’s works dialogue with its domestic architecture, each one human, personal, and somewhat fragmented in scale and scope. The exhibition plays with our tactile relationship to domestic space, Ide wanting the sculptures perceived as though they had been placed inside someone’s house, set at the kind of height where a hand might naturally find them, the exhibition’s plinths cut to thirty centimeters, a traditional table height in Japan. Floating hands and other, isolated, body parts recur across the group, standing in for this tactile, lived layer of domestic life.

A house can hold whole imagined worlds, and together these sculptures express one such world, a mindscape marked by isolation, quiet strangeness, the kind of place a person reaches only in dreams, where the mind seems to keep company with something not quite human, some other presence half-imagined, half-felt. “Distance” is a prevailing theme running through the group, with Ide sculpting forms that figure distance to oneself, distance to others, distance to humanity. Ide proposes that the mind is a structure with distinct sides, front and back, visible and unseen, and it is the back that concerns him, his sculptures picturing a context where manmade things go on with no one present to perceive them, an object agency, bodies acting with no human intentions behind them. Seen in the distance (2026) states the theme directly, its human-like figures and spare columns spaced along a low platform, in a game of hide and seek in which each form keeps its distance.

A house is also where sleep occurs, where bodies lie at rest at night, where the objects of life surround a sleeping body and carry on without it. Georges Perec described this kind of withdrawal from the world in his 1967 novella A Man Asleep, whose narrator sinks into indifference until he learns “to look at men as if they were stones.” Ide hopes audiences will see the sculptures in this manner, as small made things set down here and there, present whether or not anyone is looking at them. Lie on the border and dream (2026) lays a small figure between two standing panels, set against a found die and a fragment of sandstone, caught adrift just before sleep, when the self loosens its hold and the room carries on without it, the figure left to “lie on the floor and dream at nighttime.” Game of causality (2026), a small floating hand poised over a shallow well, is an object of exquisite loneliness, the loneliness of a plaything left behind after the play has stopped. Ide describes his works as miniatures; a miniature has the ability to accentuate a fragment, to isolate a single object or detail. That same lineage of miniatures runs through the spaced, solitary figures of Alberto Giacometti and, on a more celebratory and narrative level, the enclosed worlds of Joseph Cornell, beautiful in their isolation and secrecy. Ide’s sculptures work in two directions at once this way, building inner worlds, mindscapes, dreams, the back of the mind, while also picturing an outer world emptied of human will, the nonhuman and beyond-human realms, the possibility of, in Ide’s words, “a world without human consciousness.”

That attention to materials as they are, and to the space around them, comes through in the plainness of his materials, wood, stone, and found objects. A quiet life surfaces in the objects he selects and assembles, each one given a small narrative and holding to a life of its own across spans of time. “If my practice has a shape, it is that of a mindscape,” Ide says, naming the inner half of that same project, the half that has no need of anyone watching it. There is a paradox at the center of this – a world without people would not be empty; it would still be crowded, every surface holding some object a hand once shaped, the loneliness coming from how much of us would remain. Behind Ide’s body of work is the idea of depicting the seen and unseen on the same surface.