EX­hi­Bi­tion

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Nobuko Tsuchiya’s works are like little engines of atavistic agency—clusters and coagulations of matter that, despite their fragile, hybrid materiality, seem to activate or engage with realms beyond the purely physical. Working with fiberglass, fur, metal, resin, wire, felt, silicone, and found objects, Tsuchiya constructs sculptures of varying scale and complexity: enigmatic forms and uncanny apparatuses that might have been recovered from some lost civilization or speculative future.

This exhibition presents a constellation of new works that unfolds throughout the gallery as an interconnected, active environment. Organic shapes emerge from industrial components, while traces of human presence mingle with references to growth, decay, transformation, and renewal. The works teeter at the threshold of collapse or composition, flickering between various states of becoming. And the spaces between the works are as important as the sculptures themselves for Tsuchiya. Each of her objects is entirely autonomous—a self-contained, essential, elemental world—but when arranged across the space in a dynamic array, they operate less like an exhibition of discrete objects and more like a field of highly charged relations. “Zone42” suggests an analogue, perhaps, for the awkward and ungainly apparatus of our own bodies—the various structures and systems, organs and impulses, accretions and energies, that produce and project our strange, elusive, sensorial consciousness.

—Martin Clark