Hiraki Sawa
11/04

Sawa stayed at the JCVA during November of 2004. During his stay, three of his works were featured in Video Zone/2 2004 in the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. The works, Spotter, Dwelling, and Airliner aroused a great deal of critical and public interest.  Embodying his fascination with intimacy and the interior in his residency as in his work, Sawa took great pleasure in the residency suite and location itself.

Dwelling

Explicitly toying with scale, Sawa’s video art is chiefly a poetic mediation of the notions of dislocation and displacement. By superimposing miniaturized images on life-size spaces such as a domestic interior or an open book, he blends reality with fiction. His use of black-and-white or monochromatic film is deliberate, intended to help the viewer focus on the imagery and thematic contents. Icons of noisy speed, strength and grand dimensions flying in the boundless open skies, his aircraft are transformed in proportion and placed in a new context, creating thought-provoking fantasy spiced with humor.

In Dwelling, the artist primarily depicts the interior of his London flat. He surprises us with miniaturized airplanes taking off, flying like insects across rooms and through doorways, and finally landing in intimate corners. Thus, by pairing interior with exterior, noisy aircraft with utter silence, low-tech filmmaking with the precise technology and timing of global travel, he introduces new interrelations between space and time, which embody Joseph Joubert’s assertion: "Space is in time, silence is in space".